Adding bank accounts and credit cards

You've customized your chart accounts for all the income and expense accounts you'll need. Now let's add your bank accounts. When you receive payments from your customers, you need your bank accounts to tell QuickBooks where you're depositing that money. And later when you download transactions from your on-line banking into QuickBooks, those virtual transactions you've been recording in QuickBooks will need to match the real ones that get downloaded from your actual bank. So in the chart of account, select Account from the bottom of the screen and choose New. The first thing you need to choose is the Account Type and we'll select Bank.

From here click the blue Continue button. Now let's give our account a name. You can put the name of your bank, or just simply business checking. It's up to you. If you have multiple accounts, in the description you can put the name of the bank or the branch, just so you know what it is. It's up to you whether you want to put the bank account number or the routing number in. You certainly don't have to. Let's click Enter Opening Balance. Now remember, we had a business start date when we set up our company file in QuickBooks. So you also need to choose the opening bank account balance for this bank account that you're adding.

The easiest way to do that is to grab the latest statement, write down the statement ending date from that balance. Now, I chose my company's opening start date as the actual closing date from my bank balance. So I'm going to go ahead and put that date in, and I found my bank balance, so I can write down that number here. This way, you don't have to match up all your bank account transactions in QuickBooks. You can simply start with this ending balance and then start matching things as you go forward.

I'll click the blue OK button, and then you can also have QuickBooks reminds you to order checks when you reach a certain check number. Mainly the last one that you get from your bank. I'm going to click the Save and New button, because I'm going to add one more account. In the Account Type, at the top of the screen, this time I'm going to choose Credit Card. Again, you can give it whatever name you want. I'll call this one Business Credit Card. If you have multiple credit cards, you could also put the name of the card itself. It's up to you whether you want to put in the card account number. But likewise, let's click Enter Opening Balance.

And we'll also put another balance in there. Click the blue OK button, and this time I'm going to put a credit card number in there. It's up to you whether you want to do that or not. It's mainly for your reference. Now I'll choose save and close. And you'll be prompted to set up online services for the account. Click No for now as we're going to do that in a later video. Now when I scroll up, at the very top of my chart of account, I can see my business checking, here's the type as bank, and I can see the balance total. I can also see that I've got my business credit card. It's of type credit card and here's my balance total.

Now because we're setting up this accounts that have balances, if I double click on them, I get a check register. Click the X in the top right-hand side, close out again of the chart of accounts. And now we're ready to move on to adding our items and services.