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Express invoice for Administration

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business today i will be evaluating express accounts by nch software it's an accounting software available for free for companies with less than five employees we're evaluating it today for the fit small business case study chapter one which deals with the basic information so i want to start with the screen i'm getting as soon as i try to open so i've downloaded the software and i've installed it now when i open the software i get a screen that says this free version of express accounts is licensed only for small business use and then i have to click a button that certifies that i have fewer than five employees and so once i click that it is going to allow me to enter into the program so a little word of warning um so i was using the program before and then all of a sudden it started requiring me to it said my trial version was expired and i needed to purchase a license well when i went to uninstall the program one of the options the uninstall wizard gave me was to convert to the free version for companies with less than five employees so i did that and now i'm back to where i can enter it into the free version so i believe if you use a feature perhaps that's not available in the free version that automatically converts it to the paid version so we're going to go ahead we'll do the ver we'll go ahead and do the case study on this free version and we'll address any concerns as they arise okay um if you read the uh the review article we're going to have accompanying this video uh on our website it'll we'll talk about any difficulties we've come across during the case study in the free versus paid version of this accounting software so let's get started so the first thing is just to enter basic information about our company so across the top here it's a pretty nice layout for a screen we've got a side menu bar we've got a top menu bar i think if we're going to go to options here would give us options for setting up our basic information so we can our business type so we're going to use as our sample company a hvac and plumbing company that we're going to call fit hvac and plumbing okay and we're going to both sell a product and a service so we can put in all of our contact information looks like we can upload a logo all pretty basic okay let's go on to our accounting tab for setting things up we can put in a fiscal year end don't know why it would be on the 30th let's put it to the 31st okay let's see so it looks like here are just all some basic options that we have good so my first impression of this software is going to be that it's a very powerful software but that i think it's going to be a little bit difficult for us to get it set up properly and in real life where things aren't as straightforward as a case study it's probably going to be even more so but it is very customizable you can customize the exact numbers you want all of your different types of documents to start at i don't think i've seen that in any other free software okay so down here is our chart of accounts of course with accounting software having the proper chart of accounts is always going to be very important so let's go ahead and edit those um so the case study gives us the chart of accounts that we need and so let's just make sure we have all the chart of accounts here that we're looking for so we want a cash on hand account we need a checking account we need a savings account and i've already entered some beginning balances but we'll talk about how i did that we need an accounts receivable very good we need an inventory account we need equipment vehicles accumulated depreciation we need accounts payable credit card payable loan payable common stock additional paid in capital and retained earnings and then some income and expense accounts so how did we how did we add accounts looks like there's a very easy new button here and we can create a new account down here we can assign it an account type here we can assign it to where we want it to show up for show up in the cash flow statement so always cash flow statements are operating investing financing those are your three main categories in a cash flow statement this could take a little bit of accounting knowledge in order to get everything set up properly um good okay so let's just let's see here let's make sure if a couple of things are right here okay so let's look at some of the detail here so let's do checking account and edit so we have our checking account set up as an asset account it's a checking account there we go that's what i wanted to check make sure this is a cash postable account so we can make entries to and from it and then here's where we can enter our opening balance so after you create your your account you're going to have to come in to the properties of the account and enter your opening balance okay so that's not going to be exactly a simple way to go about entering your opening balance but if your chart of accounts isn't too huge that won't be horrible okay very good so that's our chart of accounts let's continue down our options here so we have some regional op options so here you can set your uh defaults for everyone in the united states we want us dollars sales tax we will come back here and set sales tax in a later chapter payments okay looks like you can set some how you want to receive credit card payments looks like you've got a couple of different um providers for credit cards inventory i don't believe it has a lot of inventory functions but we will come back later and look at that so a lot of these we're going to evaluate in later chapters so let's just jump down here i think the web at access now express accounts will allow you to actually access it so it's it's installed on your computer but it will allow access from the internet so i'm not an expert in this type of thing so i would be uncomfortable doing this um because i don't understand enough about the security of it you know having web access onto your computer but obviously if this is something you're comfortable with or you have somebody that you can consult with perhaps that's something you could do you could set this up as desktop software and still be able to access it from the web but we're not going to do that as part of this free program and so we're not going to be able to add any additional users great okay um good so those are our main settings for setting up our company that was all fairly uh straightforward um let's see so in our home menu here i think the only other thing we're really looking for in chapter one is we want to be able to lock the accounting software so that nobody can make any entries prior to the current year so let's see here here we go so under accounts i thought it was up here somewhere you can put a closed to date and so here we can say nobody can make any entries prior to december 31st 2021 so we were closing the books for last year this way nobody accidentally posts something to last year's books which is important because once you file your 2021 tax return you don't want to accidentally make changes if you need to make a change well then you need to talk to your tax accountant because if you change your books prior to 2021 you're going to have to change your tax return as well okay excellent so i think that is everything we needed to do in setting up our company so a couple of things we weren't able to do that the case study asked us to do was we can't specify a method of accounting so essentially it'll be accrual because it includes accounts receivable and accounts payable on your balance sheet and so that's going to be accrual accounting there's no way to report a balance sheet on cash accounting so other software quickbooks for one you can actually even though you're using accounts receivable and accounts payable you can click a button and produce cash basis financial statements we were not able to to indicate that we're an s corporation versus some other type of entity that's really not a big deal and the case that he asked us to track income and expense by two different classes hvac and plumbing actually three classes hvac plumbing administrative we're not able to track anything by multiple classes and it asks us to track items by local by location having two locations new york and delaware so we can't do that as well um so it is missing a few things that your higher end paid software would have but it is going to be a pretty it looks like a pretty decent software so far my first impressions anyway for companies that only have you know that don't need to track by class or location so good so i hope you continue on stuff through the future chapters but that was chapter one of the fit small business case study for express accounts