How to manage the Chart of accounts in Quickbooks

now that we set up our company we want to uh take a look at the chart of accounts uh now there's a couple ways to get into the chart of accounts we can go under list and get the chart of accounts there we can do the chart of accounts over here if you notice from the mouse is you can also get to it under the Company menu here's a chart of accounts notice how we can do control a so um the chart of accounts is going to get updated automatically when you do your different transactions so uh I'm going to pick on list and then char of accounts sometimes you get these kind of messages just to kind of help you out I'm going to click on okay all right I'm going to maximize this window here and this is our chart of accounts so um uh you want to periodically look at this and see you know it'll show you the balances of the accounts you can sort this screen just by clicking on the column headings if you click on the column heading a second time it'll started descending all right so this screen is easy to manage as you can see okay now um based on the interview that you that we made in the previous step it's going to set up a default chart of accounts for you now you may have to add some more so U let's say for example we want to add up uh an electric uh you know bill for our electric so I'm going to pick on account and new all right you type in what kind of account you pick what kind of account is then the income and expenses will show up on your profit and loss statement and these kind of accounts will show up on your um on other types of reports so I want to pick on that this is an expense cck on continue all right so the account let's say this is um electric bill and we'll talk about sub accounts shortly uh you can put a further description in there if you needed to and then um you can put a note in there now um the tax line mapping you can actually assign this to a specific line on your schedule C or other schedules for your taxes that makes tax time a lot easier so let's do this for utilities all right so we're just going to pick on Save and close and you can see now the electric bill is now um is now part of our chart of account so if we pick on account here then we can add uh new ones we can edit them we can delete them fairly easy to work with if I needed to change the bill I can right click on it and then I can click on edit account or delete the account there okay so it's fairly easy to add new ones as we can see now um so every transaction that we do has to be assigned to some to one of the charted accounts so it's important to manage this and monitor it and now um notice how I have a telephone expense I have the electric bill and we have utilities let's say that I really wanted to um make the electric bill and the telepan expense part of the utilities what we can do is make that a sub account so watch what I'm going to do I'm going to right click on the electric bill and pick on edit and notice how we can make that a sub account of a different account so I'll make that a sub account of utilities you do this just to organize them a little bit better now we could have done this right from the beginning or we can do it um right here after the fact so I'll click on Save and close notice how the utilities contains the electric at this time let's try that again I'm going to right click with the telephone expense pick on edit pick on it's going to be a sub account of the utilities and we're going to save and close that and now you can see the utilities contains the electric bill and the telephone expense so we're when we're in the screen we can uh see the activity of the chart of accounts notice how right now we have the $10,000 in the bank that's all the we have uh so um to add new ones of course we can pick on account pick on new edit delete we can also uh right click on any one of those and do new edit or delete from there as well and this is how you're going to manage your chart of accounts