Keeping track of all your income and expenses can be a daunting task for a small business. QuickBooks created a solution to try and simplify this task for small business owners who have no prior accounting knowledge. With QuickBooks Self-Employed you are able to link your bank account that you use for your business and quickly categorize things as business or personal and choose the type of expense a transaction is.
Advantages of QuickBooks Self-Employed include:
- Single place to track income and expenses
- Integrated mileage tracker
- Streamlined email invoices that can be sent to customers to be paid after services are rendered
- You can setup a system in order to get paid directly from that invoice by credit card or ACH
- Bank account direct link for faster data entry
- Robust mobile app that makes phone and tablet use easy
Reasons you may want to have a higher tier of QuickBooks Online (SimpleStart, Essential, Plus, or Advanced)
- No asset tracking
- No bill tracking
- No easy report for A/R tracking
- You can view open invoices in the invoice tab, but there isn’t a quick report for it like there is in the other versions
- No balance sheet
- Limited reporting
Self-Employed is not a full accounting solution for complex businesses. However, it is a great solution for a schedule C business that just wants to see income and expenses and have everything in one place for year-end taxes.
In order to setup and use self-employed here are a few steps to get you going:
- Sign up for QuickBooks Self-Employed
- This can be found at https://quickbooks.intuit.com/self-employed/
- Click the “buy now” button under Self Employed in the plans & pricing section
- Answer some questions about your business
- Link a bank account
- Click the gear icon in the right hand corner and select “Connect bank” under the transactions column.
- Type in your bank name in the search bar.
- Login and link your bank account that you use for business purposes.
- All your transactions will now automatically import into QuickBooks
- Go through your transactions by clicking the “Transactions” tab in the left bar
- Label each of these as either business or personal
- There are preset categories made by QuickBooks that line up with how it will be reported on your tax return. Choose the category that sounds the closest to what the expense was for and it will record it there in your books.
- You can then view reports to see how your business is doing.
- The main report to pay attention to is the “Profit and Loss” report. This summarizes all your income and expenses over a time period.
- This is also the report that will be used at the end of the year to report items on your tax return.
PRO TIP: If you are running a small business it is best practice to open up a bank account separate from your personal bank account in order to keep things more cleanly separated.
QuickBooks Self-Employed is a valuable tool for the small-business owner without complex accounting needs. It doesn’t have all the same reports or tools as the higher tiers of QuickBooks, but for a small business owner without complex accounting needs, it is a great, simplified solution! If you have any questions on this or anything else QuickBooks related, please give us a call at 419-289-7007 and our team of QuickBooks ProAdvisors would be happy to assist you.
