QuickBooks Online For Dummies Cheat Sheet

You can make the most of your work in QuickBooks Online by using handy and time-savings shortcuts and tool buttons.

Using keyboard shortcuts means you can seamlessly access various windows and pages without touching a mouse. The various icons at the top of the QuickBooks Online page help you quickly search for items, create new items, or display transactions.

Keyboard shortcuts for QuickBooks Online

Keyboard shortcuts can save you time by minimizing the use of your mouse. The shortcuts in the following tables are specific to QuickBooks and work in all versions.

If you’re a macOS user, substitute Option for Alt. You can also access a keyboard shortcut listing within QuickBooks by choosing Settings →Additional Info.

Use the following keyboard shortcuts while working in a transaction window.

In addition, you may be entering transactions directly into your registers because the traditional transaction screens feel cumbersome. You can speed the data entry process when you’re entering transactions into a register:

Three handy tool buttons in QuickBooks Online

The sidebar menu is but one of four places you can choose commands from. The second place is at the top of the sidebar menu, and the other two are always at the top of the screen. The Accountant version offers the most tools, but this cheat sheet is intended for Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced users.

Click the + New button to open the Create menu and select a transaction to create, as shown in the figure below. You must upgrade to a higher version of QuickBooks to use any feature that has an arrow on the right side.

Click the Search icon (a little magnifying glass) to view a list of recent transactions and to search for transactions. To open a recent transaction, click it to open it in its transaction window. Type any identifying information or click Advanced Search to specify more detailed search criteria.

Click the Settings icon (a little gear) to display the Settings menu, which helps you access many features in QuickBooks as well as configure various aspects of the software.

QuickBooks Desktop conversion considerations

You can import almost all data in a QuickBooks Desktop company into QuickBooks Online. There’s mostly a one-to-one relationship between Desktop and Online,but features in both Desktop and Online don’t exist in the other platform. This article gives you a sense of what to expect if you migrate a QuickBooks Desktop company to QuickBooks Online. You can also take advantage of a free Data Conversion guide created by Daniel DeLong, the technical editor of QuickBooks Online For Dummies, at https://sob.drift.click/DataConversionGuide.

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What doesn’t import

Most of your information from QuickBooks Desktop migrates seamlessly into QuickBooks Online, but the following table lists what doesn’t import. The QuickBooks article “Learn how features and data move from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online” provides additional details.

QuickBooks Desktop data that doesn’t import

Accounting software conversions always entail some amount of manual effort. There’s also a learning curve during which you acclimate to the new software. Plan to give yourself three months for things to smooth out.

The best practice is to run both the old software and the new software concurrently for about 90 days, a process referred to as running the programs in parallel. This ensures that you can easily continue with the old software if you discover an unexpected dealbreaker in the new program you’re trying out.

Features not fully available in QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Desktop users who need the following features should think twice before moving to QuickBooks Online:

• To Do notes
• Complete Job Costing
• Sales Orders
• Fixed Asset Tracking
• Estimate to Actual Reporting

None of these features is directly supported in QuickBooks Online. For instance, QuickBooks Online offers a fixed asset, but it’s simply a list and doesn’t offer tracking. You may be able to locate add-ons to QuickBooks Online that provide the functionality you need at https://apps.intuit.com.

Looking at list limitations

Most, but not all, of your list information will transfer from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. In this section, I show you what will and won’t make the transition to the cloud for your chart ofaccounts, customers/jobs, vendors, and various supporting lists. I talk about the items list in the section “Examining inventory and the items list.” Spoiler alert: You can convert your inventory, but you might run into some trouble.

Chart of accounts

The QuickBooks Online chart of accounts uses detail types that you don’t find in QuickBooks Desktop.You could consider a detail type to be a subtype of the major account categories. You can assign expense accounts, for example, to detail types such as Auto, Equipment Rental, and Legal & Professional Fees. QuickBooks Online can guess the detail type sometimes, such as for the Undeposited Funds account; otherwise, it assigns a generic detail type such as Other Miscellaneous Expense, which you can change. To do so, choose Reports-->AllReports-->Accountant Reports-->Account List to review the current detail. Click any line to display the Edit Account window, where you can update the detail type. While you’re here, you can add back bank account numbers and notes as well.

Customers and jobs

Good news! The conversion process imports all your customers into QuickBooks Online. Any jobs in QuickBooks Desktop becomesubcustomers. Now the bad news: The import process converts only the following customer and job information:

• Customer
• Company Name
• Mr./Ms./?
• First Name
• M.I.
• Last Name
• Phone
• Fax
• Alt. Phone
• Email
• Terms
• Bill to Address (except Note)
• Ship to Address (except Note)
• Tax Code/Item
• Preferred Payment Method
• Note (up to 4,000 characters)

Further, the following customer and job information doesn’t convert:

• Inactive Status
• Customer Type
• Rep
• Price Level
• Custom Fields
• Account
• Credit Limit
• Job Status
• Start Date
• Projected End
• End Date
• Job Description
• Job Type
• Credit Card Information

Note that Inactive Status remains ifno unbilled charges are imported.

Group items

Group items convert to bundles in QuickBooks Online for use in sales-related transactions. Any group items that appear in purchase transactions in QuickBooks Desktop become unbundled in QuickBooks Online, so you see the individual components of the group as lineitems in your transactions rather than see the group item itself.

Inactive list elements

You can mark customers and vendors as inactive in QuickBooks Desktop and Online, but inactive status changes during the conversion to active for any customersor vendors who have open balances. You may want to purge inactive items in QuickBooks Desktop before running the conversion because you can’t remove inactive items from QuickBooks Online.

Users are often frustrated when they can’t delete items. What if you just want to delete an item and set it back upagain as a new item type? The best course of action is to rename the inactiveitem. (I often add a z in front of the item name so that the inactive items move to the bottom of the corresponding list.) Then you can set up the item again, using the original item identifier.

Other names

Any items that appear in the Other Names list in QuickBooks Desktop are established as vendors in QuickBooks Online.

Recurring transactions

Your memorized transactions become recurring transactions in QuickBooks Online, but there’s a catch: You must have a Plus or Advanced subscription to access them. In Essentials, your recurring transactions are placed in cold storage, ready for use if you upgrade to QuickBooks Plus or Advanced down the line. Conversely, Simple Start users should delete all recurring transactions and templates from QuickBooks Desktop before converting to head off a passel of problems at the pass.

Sales tax items

QuickBooks Online automatically establishes a new Sales Tax Agency Payable account for each sales tax jurisdiction. Thus, after you convert, you have those new accounts along with any existing Sales Tax Payable accounts. Thereafter, QuickBooks Online uses only the new Sales Tax Agency Payable accounts. Use Sales Tax Center to manage your settings.

Any sales tax group items from QuickBooks Desktop become unbundled within your transactions, but you can set up combined sales tax items in Sales Tax Center. Any three-character tax codes associated with sales tax items in QuickBooks Desktop are discarded.

Ship Via list

Ship Via in QuickBooks Online has no equivalent. Your Ship Via choices are preserved within your transactions, and going forward, you type the information in a text field rather than choose it from a list.

Subtotals

Subtotal items in QuickBooks Desktop per form calculations, but in QuickBooks Online, they simply appear as memo entries in the Description field.

Types for customers, jobs, and vendors

Any types that you’ve assigned to customers, vendors, and jobs will be discarded. Unfortunately, QuickBooks Online simply doesn’t allow you to group list items in this fashion.

Vendors

Delete any vendors in QuickBooks Desktop that you don’t plan to pay again, or plan to mark them as inactive in QuickBooks Online. The following fields are transferred for vendors:

• Vendor
• Company Name
• Mr./Ms.
• First Name
• M.I.
• Last Name
• Phone
• Fax
• Email
• Terms
• Print on Check As
• Address
• Account
• Vendor Tax ID
• Vendor Eligible for 1099 (UnitedStates only)

Aren’t “good news, bad news” scenarios the worst? Maybe I should have led with what vanishes into thin air during the conversion process:

• Contact
• Alt. Contact
• Note
• Inactive
• Vendor Type
• Credit Limit
• Custom Fields
• Alt. Contact
• Alt Ph.

Exploring payroll conversion

Most QuickBooks Desktop payroll information converts to QuickBooks Online Payroll (QB Payroll), with, you guessed it, some exceptions:

• Pay types that QB Payroll doesn’t support
• Invalid Social Security numbers and employer identification numbers
• Addresses in territories other than those that Intuit supports, such as American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands

Employees’ pay schedules and payroll items convert, but plan to review the mappings so that paychecks are processed properly. A Complete Payroll Setup button appears the first time you display the Employees page, which prompts you to map any unmatched payroll elements from the QuickBooks Desktop import process. Search the internet for “What to do after converting from QuickBooks Desktop for Windows or Mac to QuickBooks Online.” On that page, see the “Map Your Custom Pay Types” section, or visit https://intuit.me/3pZG8iz for more information.

After importing payroll information, you need to fill out an interview to complete payroll setup, establishing information such as company contributions, before you create paychecks. You might also need to enter year-to-date payroll information for each employee. Typically, you need to verify only the totals, but if necessary, the interview guides you through entering these year-to-date totals to get going again.

Payroll setup

To complete your payroll setup,follow these steps:

1. Select Workers in the left menu and then click Employees.
2. Click the Get Started button.
3. On the My Payroll screen that appears, in the Paid in [Year] column, ensure that each employee who received a paycheck this year is listed as Yes. Employees who haven’t been paid in the current year are automatically listed as No. The Paid in [Year] column appears only before you complete payroll setup.
4. Click Complete Payroll Setup to enter or verify your year-to-date payroll totals and employee information. Use the Payroll Summary report in QuickBooks Desktop to enter the year-to-date numbers in QuickBooks Online as positive numbers, even though they appear as negative numbers in the report. You don’t have to complete payroll setup in a single sitting; you can come back later, and the Payroll Setup wizard picks up where you left off. You do need to complete payroll setup before you pay employees.

Special payroll notes

Keep these final notes in mind when importing payroll data:

• If you’ve been paying or filing your taxes electronically, you need to re-enroll for this service in QuickBooks Online. Log in and follow the steps on the Payroll Preferences page (choose Settings-->Payroll Settings) to enroll for electronic services.
• If you’ve been using or want to use direct deposit for your employees, you need to add your employer information and each employee’s bank account information. You can do so on the Payroll Preferences page (choose Settings-->Payroll Settings) or on the Employee setup page (click Employees on the Navigation bar and then edit the appropriate employee’s pay details on the Employee Details page).

Examining inventory and the items list

The Plus and Advanced subscriptions track inventory by using the first in, first out (FIFO) method on an accrual basis. You choose a date during the import process to be used in recalculating your inventory based on the FIFO method. Then you see your item quantities, item accounts, and details. Unfortunately, QuickBooks Online doesn’t provide for unit of measure.

If your inventory hasn’t appeared in QuickBooks Online within 24 hours, check for an email with this subject line: There was a problem copying your company file to QuickBooks Online. Your next step is to review the Items section of the article titled “Learn how features and data move from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online” at https://intuit.me/3dUroMi.

Examining other special cases

The following presents notes on the way the import process treats most common areas of QuickBooks Desktop.

Bills

The import process converts item receipts to bills and discards any Bill Received status.

Bill payments

Discounts applied to bills inQuickBooks Desktop become Vendor Credits in QuickBooks Online. The address on each bill payment check is overwritten with the Vendor address in the Vendor list.

Budgets

Profit & Loss and Profit & Loss by Class budgets are available in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced only.

Closing date

Your closing-date preference migrates to QuickBooks Online, but the Closing Date password is discarded. The Exceptions to Closing Date report tracks only new exceptions that occur in QuickBooks Online as of the conversion date you choose. You can still refer to earlier exception reports in QuickBooks Desktop if you keep the software installed.

Credit card charges

Credit card charges in QuickBooks Desktop become expense transactions in QuickBooks Online. Any pending credit card credits become QuickBooks Online Credit Card Credit transactions. This is going to sound redundant, but bill payments you make by credit card become bill payment transactions.

Custom fields

Oof, I hate to be the bearer of this news: You must have an Advanced subscription if you want to have custom fields for customers, vendors, employees, or items. Otherwise, anything that happened in a custom field in QuickBooks Desktop is going to remain in that custom field in QuickBooks Desktop. With that said, all subscription levels allow you to add up to three custom fields in transactions. Also, the Sales Rep field in QuickBooks Desktop converts to a customer field on sales forms.

Discounts

Who doesn’t like a discount? I have unfortunate news if you give or receive discounts on customer and vendor payments: QuickBooks Online stores your terms, but it doesn’t calculate the discount on any transactions you enter. You must make that calculation by hand. That said, any discounts applied to your QuickBooks Desktop transactions are converted to customer and vendor credits, respectively.

Documents

Any documents or attachments that you’re storing in QuickBooks Desktop remain there. QuickBooks Online does allow attachments of up to 20MB for files of the following types: PDF, JPEG, PNG, DOC, XLSX, CSV, TIFF, GIF, and XML. The conversion process doesn’t migrate previous attachments.

Finance charges

Woot! The import process converts existing finance charge invoices in QuickBooks Desktop to invoices in QuickBooks Online with no data loss.

Invoices

The following types of data undergochanges during the import process:

• PO No. translates to Custom Field 1.
• Sales Rep initials translate to Custom Field.
• Subtotals appear in the Description field for that line in the QuickBooks Online invoice, but they don’t calculate.

• Current Percentage
• Estimated Amount
• Estimated Quantity
• Estimated Rate
• Prior Amount
• Prior Average Quantity
• Prior Average Rate
• Prior Percentage
• Prior Quantity
• Total Percentage

But wait — there’s more! These invoice elements are discarded as well:

• The Other field and any custom fields in the Customer section
• The Other field and any custom fields in theItem Detail section
• Sales form templates, logos, long text disclaimers, and tax names in the Options and Others section

Income tax support

QuickBooks Online users can’t export information directly to tax preparation platforms such as TurboTax. Just to rub salt in the wound, that tax line mapping you set up in QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t transfer over either. But you can approximate tax mapping by establishing detail types in your chart of accounts. Conversely, QB Accountant users can use Tax Mapping to integrate with Intuit Pro Connect and other tax preparation software.

Journal entries

QuickBooks Desktop allows you to toggle the billable status of a journal entry. All your journal entries import without issue, but the billable status is discarded.

In QuickBooks Online, you can’t write a check on an income account, for example. You must use a bank account. Thus, if the conversion tool encounters a transaction that doesn’t compute, it creates a journal entry instead.

Customized sales form templates

Here I go again. You know those lovely sales forms that you so meticulously crafted in QuickBooks Desktop? You must create them all over again.

QuickBooks Payments Service

You need to unlink the QuickBooks Payments Service account from QuickBooks Desktop and relink it to QuickBooks Online, as shown in the QuickBooks article “Connect your QuickBooks Payments account to QuickBooks Online” at https://intuit.me/3J1Rj2Y.

Multicurrency

You can convert multicurrency transactions from QuickBooks Desktop, but some serious caveats are involved. QuickBooks Desktop allows you to create transactions with up to three currency types, but QuickBooks Online allows only two, so certain types of transactions aren’t imported. You may also see penny-rounding differences in multicurrency transactions.

Online bill payment

Checks that you haven’t yet transmitted keep their “to be sent” status; otherwise, the online payment status doesn’t transfer into QuickBooks Online.

Pending sales

QuickBooks Online doesn’t allow you to mark a sale as pending and ignores any pending transactions from QuickBooks Desktop. Going forward, you can use the Delayed Charge form in Essentials, Plus, and Advanced.

Print mailing labels

You can’t print mailing labels in QuickBooks Online. However, you can export reports such as customer or vendor lists to Excel. You can use that as the basis for performing a mail merge in Microsoft Word. Check out Word For Dummies by Dan Gookin if you need help.

Purchase orders

QuickBooks Online doesn’t link closed purchase orders from QuickBooks Desktop to the corresponding bills.

Receive items

All three ways you can receive items in QuickBooks Desktop are converted to bills in QuickBooks Online:

• Receive Item & Enter Bill
• Receive Item
• Enter Bill for Received Items

Reimbursable expenses

Reimbursable Expenses in QuickBooks Desktop are known as Billable Expenses in QuickBooks Online. Going forward, you specify the markup percentage when you create the purchase rather than when you create the invoice. Any reimbursable expenses and unbilled time in QuickBooks Desktop become Billable Expenses in QuickBooks Online.

Reports

Reports in QuickBooks Online typically don’t have direct counterparts in QuickBooks Desktop, which means you need to re-create any memorized reports you’ve established as customized reports.

Accrual-basis reports that you run in QuickBooks Desktop should match QuickBooks Online, barring any transactions that the conversion tool can’t handle. Cash-basis reports are likely to vary, however, due to two different sets of rules in the products.

Suppose that you have a service income line of $1,000, a discount of $100, and no payments:

• A cash-basis P&L in QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t reflect unpaid invoices.
• A cash-basis P&L in QuickBooks Online shows $100 of income and –$100 of discount.

Because partial payments are received for this invoice,

• QuickBooks Desktop prorates the amount of the discount that appears.
• QuickBooks Online continues to show the entire amount.

Report customization

Although your version of QuickBooks Online may not have all the report customization options that QuickBooks Desktop has, you can filter reports extensively, as well as export reports to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

Sales rep

The conversion process stores the sales reps assigned to your existing transactions in a custom field. Then you must fill in the sales rep time here and again on all future transactions. You can filter reports based on sales reps.

Income tax support

QuickBooks Online users can’t export information directly to tax preparation platforms such as TurboTax. Just to rub salt in the wound, that tax line mapping you set up in QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t transfer over either. But you can approximate tax mapping by establishing detail types in your chart of accounts. Conversely, QBAccountant users can use Tax Mapping to integrate with Intuit Pro Connect and other tax preparation software.

Terms

Your terms import with two exceptions:

• Jobs in QuickBooks Desktop inherit their terms from the parent customer.
• Subcustomers in QuickBooks Online are the equivalents of jobs and can have terms that differ from those of the parent customer.

Letters

As of this writing, QuickBooks Online doesn’t allow you to generate customized letters, but you can link your QuickBooks Online company to your MailChimp account. This integration is still in its infancy, which means any changes to contact records you make in QuickBooks sync to MailChimp, yet you must manually record changes in QuickBooks that you make in MailChimp. You can also see the “Print mailing labels” section earlier for a more traditional approach.

Entering established employers payroll history

If you’re an established employer using QuickBooks Desktop, you may want to import your company into QuickBooks Online, which automatically sets up your employees in QuickBooks Online. But if you intend to use QuickBooks Payroll, you have some setup work to complete. The Payroll Setup wizard walks you through that work. Entering payroll history is different for new businesses, however, which don’t have payroll history to enter, so the treatment for entering payroll history is light.

Switching midyear can cause confusion. I recommend (and your accountant will agree) that you plan to switch at the start of a new year or, at the very least, at the start of a quarter. You can enter history as of the last day of the preceding quarter; the only additional information you need to enter is information that affects an annual form, such as the employee’s W-2.

But if you’ve been recording payroll in QuickBooks Desktop, the QuickBooks Desktop Payroll Summary report is most useful because it contains all the information the Payroll Setup wizard requests to establish your payroll history information. Using the information on the Payroll Summary report, you enter, for each employee for the currentyear, total wages, deductions, and taxes for previous quarters. Using the same report, you enter the same information for the Year-to-Date As of Today column presented by the Payroll Setup wizard. Finally, established employers enter previous payrolls, totaled for all employees, once again using the Payroll Summary report from QuickBooks Desktop.

You enter the total payroll for each pay period in the current quarter. As you enter these numbers, you’re entering information paid to all employees for the date, which makes the task less onerous because of less data entry. Similarly, you enter total taxes paid by tax for that pay period.

And because you’ve been paying employees, you need to enter information about any payroll tax payments you made during the current payroll year to reconcile the payroll tax history.

You can use the details found at https://intuit.me/3FJkdSX to complete your company’s setup after you import it.