QuickBooks Online: Setting up for tracking Donations

In my never-ending quest to document my setup of QuickBooks Online, I went through the setup of funds for people to donate to as well as adding donors to the system. You can watch the video on that. Here’s what I learned:

Finish your Chart of Accounts

I thought I had finished setting up my Chart of Accounts last week. I was wrong. As soon as I went to setup my funds in Products/Services, I saw the gaps. In the video, I add the funds on the fly. Off camera, I had to go back and fix them because they weren’t numbered correctly. One I also had entered the name in the description instead of the name.

Integrate!

QuickBooks Online is made to integrate with a lot of 3rd-party products. They advertise over 750 integrations! What this hopefully means is that I have less data entry. On a whim, I noticed that the company I use for electronic donations (Anedot) integrates. My hope is that, when a donation is received by Anedot, it will be entered into QuickBooks, and I won’t have to enter anything.

Import!

If you are going from QuickBooks Desktop to the Online version, under the gear (top-right corner), there is an Import Desktop Data. It works slick so you can keep your data.

If you are moving to QuickBooks Online from some other place, think of how much time you can save by importing your Chart of Accounts, Donors, and Vendors. A lot of the time there is a way to export the data from your old system (assuming that system isn’t pen and paper). It is then worth the time to get the data in the format QuickBooks wants it. Data entry in QuickBooks Online is kind of clunky so this is a great workaround.

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Useful Links

• My post on QuickBooks Settings: https://jctaccounting.com/2023/04/07/quickbooks-online-account-settings/
• Post on Tracking Donations in QBO: https://jctaccounting.com/2019/12/02/how-do-you-track-donations-in-quickbooks/
• Anedot: https://www.anedot.com/
• Tech Soup: https://www.techsoup.org/
• My Blog: https://www.jctaccounting.com/