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Customers may be the lifeblood of your business, but they wouldn’t exist without the products and services you sell. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a mineral specimen dealer who does one-off sales, a reseller who sells items you make or buy wholesale in large lots, or a provider of services. You must always know what you have available to offer buyers – goods, designing websites, or offering lawn care services in your community, for example.

QuickBooks Online can keep you in the know about what you have available to sell, and it can manage the forms and transactions you need to do business with your buying audience. If you were doing your accounting and customer management manually, you might be using index cards and large wall calendars and file folders stuffed with product lists and schedules. You’d spend a lot of time digging through item drawers and closets, counting your inventory by hand, and shuffling paper invoices and sales receipts and payment documentation.

Instead, what if all of that is automated, saving time, reducing errors, and increasing your chances of success? Here’s a quick look at some of the basics.

Are You Ready?

We’ve written about product and service management a lot. So you should know that to get ready to sell, you have to have made sure QuickBooks Online is set up to handle any inventory you might have. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then click Account and settings under Your Company. Click Sales in the toolbar and scroll down to Products and services. Make sure the first, fourth, and fifth options are turned on, as pictured below (the other two are optional). If they’re not, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner and change them. Be sure to click Save when you’re finished, then Done in the lower right corner.
Make sure your Products and services settings are correct.

Have you created your product and service records? You can do this on the fly as you’re entering transactions, but it’s much better to do it ahead of time. That way, too, you’re not as likely to skip the details, which will be important later on when you’re running reports, for example. We’ve gone over the steps before. Click New in the upper left corner, then Add product/service under Other. A vertical panel slides out from the right, and you simply select from options and enter data.

Warning: Be very precise when you’re dealing with inventory information. If you haven’t gone through this process before, it might be worth scheduling a session with us to go over this important step.

Using Your Records in Transactions

Let’s go through the process of entering a sales receipt. Click New in the upper left corner, and then Sales receipt under Customers. . Choose a Customer from the drop-down list and complete any other fields necessary in the upper section of the form. Select the Service Date in the first column by clicking the calendar, then select the Product/Service in the next column (or click + Add new). The Description should fill in automatically.

QuickBooks Online provides inventory information as you’re completing sales forms.

The QTY (quantity) defaults to 1. If you mouse over or click in that field, a small window will pop up containing numbers for Qty. on hand and Reorder point, as pictured above.

Tip: If you know that you have more in stock that is showing, you can cancel out of the transaction, find the item record in the list on the Products & services page, and click Edit at the end of the row. You’ll be able to adjust the quantity or the starting value. Be very careful with this. Please contact us if you’re not very confident about how to handle this.

Enter any additional items and/or services needed and save the transaction.

The Products and Services Page

QuickBooks Online offers numerous reports related to products and services and inventory tracking (you’ll find them under Reports | Sales and customers), but you can learn a lot from the Product and Service page (Sales | Products and Services). At the top of the screen (where you can’t miss them) are two colored circles containing the number of items that are Low Stock or Out of Stock.

This important information appears at the top of the Products and Services page.

Click on either of these, and the list below will change to only display these items. You can get a lot of information about your products and services on this page, including Sales Price and Cost, Qty On Hand, and Reorder Point. You can also create new records or import databases of records in CSV, Excel, and Google Sheet format. We can help you prepare to do this.

Your business depends on accurate, real-time information about your inventory, and QuickBooks Online can supply it. This element of the site, though, requires precision and regular upkeep. If you’re struggling with it, let us step in and help. We’re available to troubleshoot one-time problems, but we can also take a more active role in your accounting.

Do you have a regular schedule you follow with your QuickBooks Online work? It can be a good strategy.

Bookkeeping is cyclical. You tend to do the same things over and over, which may get to be a bit of a drag for you. QuickBooks Online can automate some processes, and it certainly helps minimize duplicate data entry, but you’ll undoubtedly find yourself growing weary of repetitive tasks.

We can’t help you avoid this drudgery completely, but we’d like to suggest a new, more organized way to attack your accounting tasks in 2025. It could be especially helpful if you’re a new QuickBooks Online user and don’t have a routine established yet. But even long-time users might find this routine helpful. It can keep things from slipping through the cracks and simply make you more productive and confident that you’re addressing all of your accounting issues.

Give it a try and see what you think.

What Should You Do Every Day?

Even if you don’t have expenses to enter or invoices to process, it’s a good idea to log into QuickBooks Online every day. If you’ve connected your online bank and credit cards to the site (which you absolutely should), there will probably be transactions to go over. So after you’ve taken a look at your Dashboard (especially your Tasks), hover your mouse over Transactions in the toolbar and click Bank transactions.

Click Update in the upper right to make sure you’re seeing the most recent transactions. If you’re doing this every day, it shouldn’t take long to go over the income and expenses that have been imported since you last logged in.

You should be looking at newly imported transactions daily and completing the fields provided as comprehensively as possible.

If you don’t know what Match or Record as transfer mean, we should schedule a session to go over transaction management in QuickBooks Online.

Every Week

You need to be monitoring your accounts receivable and payables on a weekly basis – at minimum. There are two ways to do this. You can:

Run reports.

• Click Reports in the toolbar and scroll down first to Who owes you. Run Accounts receivable aging summary. QuickBooks will display past-due transactions in several columns (Current, 1-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, and 91 and over). If you’re keeping up with your receivables, you shouldn’t be seeing numbers in most of the columns, unless you’re in a known collections process.

• Scroll down to What you owe and run Accounts payable aging summary. This works like the aging receivables report. Again, you shouldn’t be seeing much activity here unless you’re in a payment dispute with a vendor.

• You can also run the Open Invoices report to quickly see the Due date and Open balance entries here. Ditto the Unpaid Bills report.

Consult the All sales page.

Hover your mouse over Sales in the toolbar and click All sales. The colored bars and numbers at the top of the page show you the status of your sales. Click the orange bar in the middle to see a list of overdue invoices. If there are any, you can set a Send reminder by clicking the corresponding down arrow in the Action column. While you’re there, look at estimates and unbilled income and take any action needed.

Every Two Weeks (or more often, depending on product volume)

If you sell products and track inventory in QuickBooks Online, you should keep a close eye on your stock to see if you need to:

• Reorder,

• Bring in a larger supply because something is selling well, or,

• Discount or discontinue a product because it’s not selling.

Click Reports in the toolbar and run Product/Service List under Sales and customers and look at the Quantity on hand column.

Every Month

Reconcile your accounts (Transactions | Reconcile).

It’s really, really important that you reconcile your accounts every month. We can help you with this.

No one likes to do this, but it’s way easier to do regular reconciliations than it is to have to go back several months to track down a problem. If you’ve never done this in QuickBooks Online, it works similarly to how you used to reconcile your accounts by comparing a bank statement and your paper checkbook register. Only you’re comparing your bank or credit card statements to your accounts in QuickBooks Online. Before you start, make sure you’ve matched and categorized all of your downloaded transactions.

Run a Profit and Loss report for the last month.

Click Reports in the toolbar and click Profit and Loss under Business overview. Did you make a profit last month?

Every Quarter

If you’re planning to apply for a loan or looking for an investor, or if you just want a deeper understanding of how your business is doing, consider having us create and analyze standard financial reports for you, like the Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows. You can run these yourself in QuickBooks Online, but it really takes an accountant’s eye to understand and interpret them.

If you decide that you want to work with us in any capacity, like helping you with reconciliation and/or modifying your Chart of Accounts, there’s another way we can help. If you ever have trouble categorizing an expense, select Uncategorized Expenses as the Category. If we’re meeting with you once a month, we can run a report on these and help you categorize them correctly.