QuickBooks Online: Setting up the Chart of Accounts

This last semester I taught Cost Accounting. Whenever I told this to any of may accountant friends, they would immediately say how sorry they were for me. I knew exactly why they felt that way. I had a fantastic professor at the University of Jamestown when I took Cost Accounting (Polly Peterson who is currently their President), but I still struggled to stay conscious in class.

The Cost Accounting class I taught was at 8:00am so the odds of everyone staying awake were against me. Surprisingly enough, everyone stayed awake throughout the semester. The students were exceptional and receive most of the credit. For my part, I did attempt to make lessons as practical as possible…and primarily used food-related examples.

One of the topics we dwelled on was setting up the chart of accounts. The most important part of setting up an accounting system is the Chart of Accounts. I couldn’t stress this enough. As accountants, they would someday be responsible for setting up the chart of accounts for a business, and this would either be a blessing or a curse for the business.

In the video, I give some pointers on setting up the chart of accounts, show how to begin setting things up in QuickBooks Online, and show how to import the template I linked below. So what am I going to do with the rest of this post? Share some tips, tricks, and insights? Nope. Here’s some accounting jokes for you:

• What do you call an accountant without a spreadsheet? Lost.
• Have you heard the one about the fun accountant? Me neither.
• If an accountant’s wife cannot sleep, all she has to say is “Dear, tell me about your day at work.”

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Useful Links

• Church Template for Importing: https://jctaccounting.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/quickbooks_online_coa_sample_file.xls
• Webinar on Chart of Accounts: https://youtu.be/WnEhvVd5Xws
• QuickBooks Online: https://quickbooks.intuit.com