QBO Sample Company: How to Use Craig's Design and Landscaping for Practice

The QBO sample company is the single most underused training tool in the entire QuickBooks Online ecosystem. Officially called Craig's Design and Landscaping Services, this fully populated demo file lets you click, break, undo, and rebuild every workflow in QuickBooks Online without touching a real client's books. For ProAdvisors preparing for certification, bookkeepers learning a new feature, or business owners trying QBO before subscribing, the sample company is the safest sandbox available, and it costs nothing to access.

What makes Craig's Design and Landscaping special is its data depth. Intuit has pre-loaded the file with realistic customers, vendors, products, services, invoices, bills, bank feeds, payroll transactions, and even some intentional reconciliation errors. You get a live general ledger with two years of activity, not an empty shell. That means every report you run — Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, A/R Aging, Sales by Customer — returns meaningful numbers you can actually analyze and discuss.

The qbo sample company is also the file Intuit uses inside the ProAdvisor certification exam scenarios. If you have ever wondered why training videos all show the same lemon-yellow truck logo or customers named Amy's Bird Sanctuary and Bill's Windsurf Shop, this is why. Knowing your way around Craig's Design before you sit the exam shortens prep time dramatically because the muscle memory transfers directly to the test environment.

Access is browser-based and resets automatically. Each time you load the sample company URL or sign in fresh, the data is rolled back to its starting state, meaning anything you posted in your last session disappears. That reset behavior is a feature, not a bug — it guarantees a clean lab every time you sit down to practice journal entries, bank rules, class tracking, or year-end closing procedures.

This guide walks through every angle of the sample company: how to log in without a subscription, what scenarios to practice first, how to use it for certification prep, common limitations, and the workarounds advanced users rely on. By the end, you will treat Craig's Design and Landscaping as your personal QuickBooks gym — a place to lift heavy reps before performance day with a paying client.

We will also cover what the sample file cannot do. Some payroll features, certain integrations, and the actual subscription billing screens are intentionally locked. Knowing those boundaries upfront prevents the frustration of trying to test a feature that simply will not respond inside the demo. Once you understand both the power and the edges of the sandbox, you can build a structured practice routine that turns Craig's Design into measurable QBO skill.

Whether you found this page searching for a way to try QuickBooks Online free, prep for the ProAdvisor exam, or troubleshoot a workflow before applying it to a client, the strategies below will save you hours. Bookmark the access URL, schedule a weekly practice session, and treat every reset as a fresh chance to master one more corner of the application that pays your bills.

Once inside Craig's Design and Landscaping Services, take a few minutes to tour the data before diving into transactions. The Customers list contains a deliberately diverse roster — service customers like Amy's Bird Sanctuary, sub-customers nested under parent accounts, customers with multi-currency exposure, and a handful with overdue balances. This variety is intentional. It mirrors the customer types you encounter in real engagements, which means the practice you do here transfers cleanly to client work the moment you finish your session.

The Vendors list is just as rich. You will find Hicks Hardware, Norton Lumber and Building Materials, Mahoney Mugs, and a few service-based vendors with recurring bills. Some vendors are flagged for 1099 reporting, which lets you practice year-end vendor compliance workflows including W-9 collection, threshold tracking, and 1099-NEC preparation. The vendor center also has a small but functional bills queue, which is perfect for practicing the payables and approvals routine without risking a real check run.

Products and Services in the sample company include both inventory items (Rock Fountain, Sprinkler Heads, Pump) and non-inventory or service items (Design, Installation, Maintenance). This mix gives you a chance to test inventory valuation, quantity on hand adjustments, and the difference in journal entries between selling a physical good and billing for a service hour. If you have struggled to explain inventory accounting to a small business owner, walking through these items inside the sample is the quickest way to lock it in.

Bank and credit card accounts are pre-connected to a simulated bank feed. You will see Checking, Savings, and Mastercard accounts with a healthy backlog of downloaded transactions waiting for review. The bank feed is the single best practice ground in the entire file because you can categorize, split, add, match, and create bank rules without any real-world consequence. Spend an hour here and your speed in client engagements will jump noticeably.

The Chart of Accounts is fully built out with realistic account names and types. Income accounts are split between Design income, Landscaping Services, and Sales of Product Income. Expense accounts cover Job Materials, Subcontractors, Utilities, and dozens of categories. Detail types are pre-mapped, so you can study how Intuit recommends categorizing common transactions and compare those choices against your own preferences. Many ProAdvisors review this chart before recommending an industry-specific COA to clients.

Payroll is partially simulated. The sample file shows existing payroll entries, employee profiles, and tax liability balances, but the live payroll subscription is intentionally inactive. You can study the layout, run payroll reports, and review prior paychecks, but you cannot generate a new payroll run. For deeper payroll practice, pair this file with our qbo payroll, which walks through the steps that the sample file restricts.

Finally, the Reports center is fully unlocked. Every standard, custom, and management report renders against the sample data. This is where most learners spend the bulk of their time once basic data entry feels comfortable, because reading reports is what clients actually pay you to do. The sample's two-year history means trend analyses, year-over-year comparisons, and budget-to-actual reviews all return real, defensible numbers you can practice explaining out loud.

The QBO sample company is the most efficient prep tool for the Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor exam, and most candidates do not use it nearly enough. Intuit's training videos, study guides, and even the exam scenarios themselves are filmed inside Craig's Design and Landscaping Services. That means every menu position, every default report, every customer name you see in the testing environment also lives in the free sample file. Familiarity with the layout removes a surprising amount of cognitive load on exam day.

Start your prep by mapping each ProAdvisor exam module to a sample company exercise. The exam covers QuickBooks Online setup, supporting clients, billing and revenue, expenses, banking and reconciliation, reports, and advanced topics like classes, locations, and projects. Each of these maps to a specific menu in Craig's Design. Build a personal study log where every module gets at least three timed practice sessions inside the sample before you attempt the corresponding exam section.

Timed practice matters. The certification exam is generous with time, but real-world client work is not. Use a stopwatch and try to complete a full sales cycle — invoice, payment, deposit, reconciliation — in under five minutes. If it takes longer, identify the slow step and drill it three more times. Speed inside the sample translates directly into billable efficiency once you start charging clients. Most ProAdvisors who price by the engagement quietly subsidize their margins through sample-honed speed.

The sample company is also where you should practice explaining your work out loud. Open the file, perform a task, then narrate why you made each click as if a client were watching. This builds the soft skill the exam quietly tests through scenario questions — the ability to translate accounting decisions into language a non-accountant can act on. Recording yourself once a week and reviewing the playback exposes filler words and gaps in your reasoning faster than any textbook.

Pair your sample work with the official Intuit training modules and the practice questions linked throughout this guide. The combination of reading, doing, and self-quizzing produces dramatically better retention than any single tactic on its own. If you only have time for one habit, choose doing — opening the sample file and clicking through real workflows beats passive video watching by a wide margin in every learning study ever conducted on accounting software.

For broader exam context and the full study roadmap, our QBO ProAdvisor Test comprehensive overview walks through every exam section, scoring weight, and the order most successful candidates tackle the material. Pair that overview with weekly sample company sessions and you will be ready to schedule your exam in roughly six to ten weeks, depending on prior bookkeeping experience.

One final certification tip: do not memorize transactions, memorize patterns. The exam will hand you a scenario and ask which workflow applies. If you have repeatedly worked through similar patterns inside Craig's Design — billable expenses, deposit corrections, class reassignments, undoing a reconciliation — you will recognize the pattern instantly and pick the right answer in seconds. Pattern recognition is the entire game, and the sample company is where you train your eye.

Knowing the limitations of the sample company prevents the kind of frustration that drives learners back to passive video watching. The first and biggest limit is the automatic reset. Every time your session ends — whether by sign-out, browser close, or roughly an hour of inactivity — the data rolls back to its baseline. There is no save state, no export, and no way to share your in-progress work with another user. Plan every visit as a closed loop with a single learning objective.

Live payroll is the second major restriction. The sample file shows historical payroll, employee records, and prior tax filings, but you cannot run a new payroll inside Craig's Design. The Run Payroll button either greys out or returns a banner explaining that the demo environment does not include an active QuickBooks Payroll subscription. If payroll is your weak area, supplement the sample with a free trial of a real QBO Payroll account on a dummy company you create yourself.

Merchant services and direct deposit are similarly simulated. You can record customer payments and vendor disbursements, but no actual money moves and no third-party processor is involved. This is fine for learning workflow mechanics, but it means you cannot test fee calculations, settlement timing, or the specific reporting that QuickBooks Payments produces in a live subscription. Note this gap when explaining payment processing to clients.

App integrations are partially available. The Apps menu inside the sample renders, but you cannot complete most installations because the third-party authorization step requires a real QBO account ID. You can browse the marketplace, read app descriptions, and study which categories Intuit recommends, but full integration testing requires a live subscription. Many ProAdvisors maintain a paid dummy company specifically for app testing for this reason.

Despite these limits, several workarounds extend the sample's usefulness. Screenshot every report you produce so you can study the output offline. Use a screen recording tool to capture entire workflows for later review or training material — those recordings become the backbone of many ProAdvisor YouTube channels and client training libraries. Keep a personal cheat sheet of where each feature lives, because menu locations occasionally shift after Intuit pushes a UI update.

When you genuinely outgrow the sample, the next step is a free 30-day QBO Plus trial under a fake company name and address. This gives you a writable file you can return to repeatedly until the trial expires. After that, ProAdvisor members get a free QuickBooks Online Accountant account, which unlocks a wholesale billing portal and the ability to spin up client test files at no marginal cost. Pairing the free sample with QBOA is the standard configuration for most certified ProAdvisors.

If you ever get stuck during practice, Intuit's official documentation and community forums are searchable and well-indexed. Our companion piece on how to get QuickBooks Online support walks through every support channel including in-product chat, ProAdvisor priority phone lines, and the Accountant community board. Knowing where to ask for help is its own skill, and most learners save hours by escalating early rather than wrestling alone with a workflow that is gated for sample users.

To turn the sample company from a curiosity into a measurable skill builder, you need a routine, a logbook, and a target. The routine is the easy part: pick one fixed day and time each week, set a 45-minute timer, and open Craig's Design and Landscaping. Do not skip the calendar block. Skill in QuickBooks Online compounds with consistency far more than with intensity, and ten weekly sessions outperform ten hours crammed into a single weekend by a wide margin in every learner I have coached.

The logbook turns sessions into data. Keep a simple spreadsheet with five columns: date, focus area, time spent, what you completed, and what felt slow or confusing. After six weeks you will see patterns — maybe bank rules still take you twice as long as they should, or journal entries feel uncertain. The log directs your next session to your actual weak spots instead of letting you drift toward whatever feels comfortable. Drifting is the silent killer of certification readiness.

The target is what gives the routine meaning. Common targets include passing the ProAdvisor exam by a specific date, billing your first three QBO clients, or building a standardized monthly close workflow you can sell as a fixed-fee package. Write your target somewhere you see daily and re-read it before each sample session. Even a vague target outperforms no target, because the brain quietly optimizes practice toward whatever goal is top of mind when you sit down.

Use real client scenarios in reverse. When you encounter a tricky workflow at a real client, recreate it inside the sample the next day and solve it slowly. This converts every confusing moment into a permanent skill upgrade. ProAdvisors who do this consistently develop a reputation for unflappability because nothing surprises them twice. The first time a transaction stumps you, it is a problem. The second time, after you practiced it in Craig's Design, it is a routine click sequence.

Pair the sample with our QBO practice test video answers for a guided experience. The video format lets you pause, switch to the sample tab, replicate the click, and confirm understanding before moving on. This active-recall style of study is dramatically more effective than passive viewing and is the single change most struggling ProAdvisor candidates make that finally pushes them across the passing threshold on the certification exam.

Build a personal library of completed scenarios. Use a free Notion page, a Google Doc, or even a printed binder to capture step-by-step playbooks for the workflows you have mastered: monthly close, sales tax filing, 1099 preparation, year-end adjusting entries, new client onboarding. Each playbook starts as a notes file from a sample company session and grows into a deliverable you can hand to clients or junior staff. This library is the single most valuable asset a self-taught ProAdvisor builds in their first year.

Finally, share what you learn. Post a screenshot of a tricky bank rule on LinkedIn, answer a question in the Intuit Accountant community, or write a short blog post explaining a workflow. Teaching forces you to articulate what you actually know, surfaces gaps you would otherwise miss, and quietly builds the personal brand that turns sample-company-trained skills into paying client engagements. The sample is free, the practice is free, and the only scarce resource is your weekly 45 minutes. Protect those minutes and Craig's Design will pay you back for years.