Let’s go to the Playground, QuickBooks Online Accountant's Your Books

April 17, 2016

8:54 PM

There’s no better way to get to know a product than to TEST it and USE it. Intuit has created several playground environments for this very purpose. The Your Books inside of QuickBooks Online Accountant has been left for you to decide how you want to use it. Whether you choose to have it as your playground for testing new apps to see how they integrate and insure functionality before going live with a client's file, or your firm’s own company file running in QuickBooks Online Accountant, either way it’s free for you to use.

If you haven’t moved your company’s file to the cloud this is the perfect time and place to do just that. Remember this is included as a bonus for being a ProAdvisor. If your company’s file is located in a different location, then instead of leaving the 'Your Books' empty, try using it as your testing area.

Apps are a great reason to visit the playground. Every month, more and more Apps are being added to aid in the specialized needs of our clients. With so many solutions available for us and our clients to choose from, it’s great to try before your client buys. As their ProAdvisor it is best to recommend a solution you are confident will work. Testing the App in your QuickBooks Online Accountant 'Your Books' lets you connect an App without the client watching, thus giving you the opportunity to become an expert and provide them with a tested solution. Another benefit is that you can upload a specific situation, or set of books, and test how the App will work inside a controlled environment and monitor the books for a trial period. When you are finished testing you can overwrite the data in the Your Books, this process can be repeated over and over just as long as you do not add a data file with PAYROLL. Intuit is very specific about this, once you add a data file with payroll, the data is stuck forever. Recently Intuit has talked about creating a solution so a company file with payroll does not stick, but for now the rule is, data with payroll stays forever, so be mindful.

To import data into “Your Books” for either the first time, or for testing, the import the procedure is the same. When importing into “Your Books” there is not an end date for importing; however, Intuit only allows a 90-day import period for all regular QuickBooks Online accounts. Be mindful, if you test products in “Your Books” it does cost you the normal per month price,so if you are testing a product for a client then this is the most economical method for doing so.

Importing:

Step 1 - From inside QuickBooks Desktop: Company > Export Company File to QuickBooks Online.

Import to QBO Step 1

(Note: there are several articles and videos about how to upload a data file which include verifying your data for fragments, size, clean up before you convert and run reports to verify data.)

Step 2 - Use your QuickBooks Online Accountant credentials to log-in.

Step 2 - QBES 2 QBO

Step 3 - Choose “Your Books” company (if you have named it already choose the “Your Books” custom name)

QBD to QBO Step 3

Step 4 - Once the upload is initiated you can sit back and wait till Intuit emails saying the data file is ready. How long this process takes depends on how much data is in the file being uploaded.

Step 6 - QBES 2 QBO

Step 5 - Upload Complete - when your file upload is finished, you will have 'Your Books' ready for play.

Upload Complete

Now it's time to 'get your hands dirty.' By playing with Apps in your playground you may find absolutely the perfect solution or solutions for your client’s needs.

Apps via QBOA

Currently there are two different looks for your QuickBooks Online Accountant Dashboard; the standard Navigation Bar, and the new Navigation Bar. These two dashboards each have their own look and somewhat different features, or at least feature arrangements. For purposes of using “Your Books” you can see below that they look quite a bit different.

Tool bar comparison

Using the Standard Navigation Bar (on the left above) simply click on “Your Books” and the view looks the same as other files. But if you have switched to the New Navigation Bar (on the right above) then there is no need to open “Your Books”, instead choose what you would like to view inside QuickBooks Online Accountant because the company file stays available.

So go ahead, get dirty. Play to your heart's content. You have my permission, after all 'Your Books' can be your personal playground if you want it to be.

Preview of next week - I have seen in many forums where people are saying, “hey where did the ProAdvisor portal go?” Next week I will tackle the topic of the ProAdvisor portal missing from the New QuickBooks Online Accountant dashboard.

Liz

Comments (3)

Comment Feed

Intuit Needs to Find a Better Way

I agree with Michelle that it isn't ideal to do test within your QBOA. For one thing, I wanted to demo a 3rd party app for a client and decided just to sync it to my own QBOA (which our firm does use for internal accounting.) The problem with this scenario was that, in order to show it to our client I would have had to show them internal information. No dice. So, how do we demo products and demo apps for clients? Hopefully Intuit can find a way to add apps to the sample company or give us ProAdvisors some type of testing environment. This used to be easy on Desktop - create a test company (or 2, or 3, or...) and test away with multiple scenarios.

Tonya Schulte more than 8 years ago

Do NOT use Your Books for testing client data

Nice article Liz! However, I would NOT recommend using Your Books for testing with client data. When you add a new customer/client in Your Books, it is automatically added as a client on your QBOA dashboard. You would NOT want your client's customers showing as a client on your QBOA dashboard. :)

Michelle Long more than 8 years ago

You make a good point - but testing Apps is the issue possed for the playground.

I certainly am not a QBO expert, and I will definitely admit that up front; but I did some testing with Liz today on this, and for the life of me I don't see what the negative aspects area of testing a client's data for purposes of App integration in this way.

Yes Michelle, you make a Very Good point, it is true that the uploaded file will result in the customer names appearing in the dashboard of your QBOA, but that is 'just' for the testing period....the article never posed any long-term use of the client's data in this manner.

And while there is a 'sample' QBO file, I am fairly certain that you can NOT link that sample to any Apps, so that doesn't provide a means of App testing either.

If you are signing-up new clients via your QBOA (discount) then you only have 24-hours (or less) to dump the account before charges are incurred, that hardly provides time to test several apps with the client's data.

If the client signs-up for a 30-day trial then you can't test Apps via your QBOA with the Client's trial subscription, at least not as the Advisor, that is what our testing showed.

If you clear-out 'My Books' after testing the data, by uploading an empty file, then all the names from the upload are dropped and you are back to square one.

Murph

insightfulaccountant.com more than 8 years ago