Make 2026 a more productive year by expanding your use of QuickBooks Online.

QuickBooks Online may have been a bit overwhelming when you were first introduced to it, especially depending on how early you started using it. You had to learn how the navigation system worked and what forms you needed for various tasks, and you probably poured over the site’s settings to make sure the software was set up to meet your specific needs.

Fortunately, Intuit built the site for small business owners who don’t necessarily know much about accounting, so the learning curve isn’t as steep as it might have been. However, have you continued to explore all that QuickBooks Online can do for you? We tend to learn what we need to know and then stop expanding our use of the site, and as you know, Intuit continues to add features and make changes to the user interface.

As one of your 2026 resolutions, we’d like to suggest that you take some time this month to poke around in QuickBooks Online and see whether you can save some time and improve your productivity. Here are five places to start.

1. Go through all your settings

If you haven’t done so in the last six months or so, we recommend you take a good look at some of QuickBooks Online’s Settings. Click the gear icon in the upper right and select Account and settings under Your Company. Scroll down to explore the following sections:

• Sales. Sales form content is especially important, since it allows you to modify the fields in your sales forms like invoices. Additionally, check Products and services to make sure you’ve turned on everything you need, and Reminders, where you can set up automated invoice reminders.
• Expenses. Look at the Bills and Expenses section here to customize your payables. Turn on Purchase orders if you’ll need them.
• Advanced. This section of your Settings is critical. You should have covered the content here thoroughly when you first started using QuickBooks Online, but give it another careful, close look.

We talked about Settings recently, but we really want to encourage you to go over them sometime this month.

2. Attach documentation to your transactions

While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be audited by the IRS, if you are, you’ll need thorough, tangible proof of your income and expenses. QuickBooks Online provides a way to keep this information handy by allowing you to attach files to transactions like bills and expenses. Scroll down to the bottom of any page that supports this tool and click Add attachment. Your PC file directory will open. Browse to the file you want to attach and double click it.  To see a list of all your attachments, click the gear icon and then click Lists | All Lists | Attachments.

Remember that if you use the QuickBooks Online mobile app, you can snap photos of receipts and have them stored in the application.

3. Use the double-tab system

If you want to have two QuickBooks Online pages open at the same time, right-click on a navigation link, like the Home button in the toolbar, and select Open link in new tab.  This will open a new tab displaying QuickBooks Online. There’s a new option here. You can click Open link in split view. This divides your screen into two vertical panes. You can work in either. To close one of the views and get back to a single page, look for the X in the lower right corner.

4. Use the more or more actions links

Depending on the type of transaction you’ve created, you can find additional options for managing it in a link at the bottom of the screen. In invoices, it’s called More actions. As you can see in the image below, there are several related actions you can take here, including Receive payment and Send reminder. Bills have a More link that allows you to, for example, copy it to a Vendor Credit form or see its Audit history. You can do these things elsewhere on the site, but QuickBooks Online often offers multiple ways to access the same screens.

The More actions menu opens when you click that link on an invoice you’re created.

5. Use keyboard shortcuts

Yes, we know it can be a pain to learn keyboard shortcuts and remember them. You don’t have to take on all of them but learning a few can save you time, especially considering that QuickBooks Online’s new user interface can be confusing. Try starting with the actions you perform regularly.

For example, Ctrl+Alt+I opens a blank invoice form, and Ctrl+Alt+x displays the Expenses & Pay Bills overview. Ctrl+Alt+? opens a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts. You can also see your Company ID here.

Make 2026 a great year

A new year means new opportunities to make your small business grow. While we don’t know what 2026 will bring, we’re here to help you use QuickBooks Online to manage whatever comes down the road for you. Whether you’re still struggling with the new UI, want to start using the mobile app but you need some assistance with it, or are taking on inventory tracking for the first time, we can answer whatever questions you have.

Looking ahead, QuickBooks Desktop will be sunsetting in May of 2027, making now an important time to switch over to QuickBooks Online if you haven’t already. Please reach out to us to schedule a consultation to learn more.