Create your account and pick a plan, enter your company's legal and tax details, connect your bank and credit card accounts, build out your chart of accounts, and add your customers, vendors, and products. Most of this is a one-time setup, not something you redo, but getting the order right the first time saves cleanup later. Here's the sequence that actually works.
1. Create your account and choose a plan. Sign up for QuickBooks Online and pick a plan based on what you actually need, invoicing and basic reporting, or inventory, project profitability, and more users. You can upgrade later, so don't over-buy on day one.
2. Enter your company details. Go to Settings > Account and Settings and fill in your legal business name, industry, EIN, and fiscal year. QuickBooks uses your industry selection to suggest a starting chart of accounts, so pick the closest match even if it's not exact.
3. Link your bank and credit card accounts. Under Transactions > Bank Transactions, link each account you use for the business. QuickBooks pulls in roughly 90 days of transaction history automatically once connected, saving you from entering everything by hand.
4. Review and adjust your chart of accounts. QuickBooks sets up a default list of accounts based on your industry. Go through it once, rename anything that doesn't match how you actually talk about your business, and add anything genuinely missing, but resist creating a new account for every small thing.
5. Add your customers, vendors, and products or services. Under Sales > Customers and Expenses > Vendors, add who you bill and who you pay. Under Sales > Products and Services, add what you sell so invoices pull in pricing automatically instead of you typing it every time.
6. Set your invoice defaults and sales tax, if you need it. Under Account and Settings > Sales, set your default terms and invoice template. If you charge sales tax, turn it on under Taxes and set it up for the locations where you're required to collect.
Setup looks like a single checklist, but a few of these decisions keep generating work later if they're wrong from the start. A messy chart of accounts, duplicate categories, nothing broken out that you actually need visibility into, means every report afterward needs manual recategorizing before it's useful.
The other common gap is what happens after setup: a business connects its bank feed and adds a few customers, then everything else, bills, deposits, matching, categorization, stays manual because nobody set up the pieces that could have run on their own from day one.
Setup is also the easiest point to decide what shouldn't be manual going forward, before habits form around doing it the slow way. Waiting until the manual process already hurts usually means more to unwind later.
Instead of starting from QuickBooks' generic industry template and living with whatever doesn't quite fit, we set the account structure up around the reporting a business actually needs, by job, by location, by department, from day one.
If a business is already running a CRM, a POS, or a job management tool before QuickBooks setup even finishes, we connect them during setup instead of treating the integration as a separate project six months later.
That's two cases, not an exhaustive list. Tell us what your business actually looks like and we'll tell you how to set it up so less of it stays manual.
Tell us about your business before you finish setup, how you bill, what you sell, what other tools you're already using, and we'll tell you what should connect automatically from day one instead of becoming a cleanup project in six months. This applies well past initial setup too: whatever's manual later is worth the same conversation.
Let's talk →Go to the gear icon and look for Switch company, then Add another company, or sign up for a new subscription if you're starting completely fresh. QuickBooks treats each company as its own separate set of books with its own subscription cost.
Go to Taxes > Sales tax > Set up sales tax. QuickBooks asks for your business address and the states or localities where you're registered to collect, then calculates rates automatically on invoices going forward based on where the sale happened.
Direct deposit is part of QuickBooks Payroll, not a separate setting on its own: once you've got a payroll subscription, go to Payroll > Employees, open an employee's profile, and enter their bank account info under Payment method.
QuickBooks creates a default chart of accounts based on the industry you select during setup. Go to Settings > Chart of Accounts to review it, edit names to match how your business actually talks about them, and add accounts for anything genuinely missing. Fewer, well-organized accounts make for cleaner reports than a long list of overly specific ones.