If
you frequently add or edit more than one customer, vendor, or item at a time,
working in a New or Edit window (like New Customer or Edit Item) isn’t only
tedious, but it also takes up time you should spend on more important tasks,
like selling, managing cash flow, or finding out who has the incriminating
pictures from the last company party.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Setting Up Items
Whether
you build houses, sell gardening tools, or tell fortunes on the Internet,
you’ll probably use items in QuickBooks to represent the products and services
you buy and sell. But to QuickBooks, things like subtotals, discounts, and
sales tax are items, too. In fact, nothing appears in the body of a QuickBooks
sales form (such as an invoice) unless it’s an item. You can also use items to
fill in the bills and other purchase forms you record. Now that you’ve got your
chart of accounts, customers, jobs, and vendors set up in QuickBooks, it’s time
to dive into items.
Setting Up Customers, Jobs, and Vendors
You
may be fond of strutting around your sales department proclaiming, “Nothing happens
until somebody sells something!” As it turns out, you can quote that tired
adage in your accounting department, too. Whether you sell products or
services, the first sale to a new customer often initiates a flurry of
activity, including creating a new customer in QuickBooks, assigning a job for
the work, and the ultimate goal of all this effort—invoicing your customer
(sending an invoice for what you sold that states how much the customer owes)
to collect some income.
Setting Up a Chart of Accounts
If
you’ve just started running a business and keeping your company’s books, all
this talk of accounts, credits, and debits might have you flummoxed. Accounting
is a cross between mathematics and the mystical arts; its goal is to record and
report the financial performance of an organization. The end result of
bookkeeping and accounting is a set of financial statements (page 448), but the
starting point is the chart of accounts.
Getting Around in QuickBooks
You
have more than enough to do running your business, so you don’t want
bookkeeping to take any more time than necessary. QuickBooks’ icon bar (which
comes in two flavors: left and top) offers shortcuts to your favorite features.
Each version of the icon bar has its pros and cons, so you have to decide which
one you prefer (or you can hide them). This chapter shows you how to access
QuickBooks’ features from both the menu bar and icon bars.
Modifying Company Info
When you use the
basic setup process or the EasyStep Interview, QuickBooks gets the basic facts
about your company in small chunks. But after you create your company file, you
can easily view and edit any of this information. Here's how:
1.
Choose
Company→My Company or click the My Company entry in the icon bar.
The My Company
window opens. As shown in Figure 1-7 (background), your company info appears on
the left and info about your copy of QuickBooks appears on the window's right.
Apps, services, and subscriptions that you've signed up for (like accepting
credit cards, payroll, and so on) appear below your company info. Other
products that Intuit would like to sell you appear at the bottom of the window.
Opening Company File
Opening
an Existing Company File
After
you've opened a company file in one QuickBooks session, the next time you
launch the program, it automatically opens that same company file. If you keep
the books for only one company, you might never have to manually open a
QuickBooks company file again.
But
if you're an irrepressible entrepreneur or a bookkeeper who works on several
companies' books, you can open another company file in QuickBooks anytime, and
the program automatically closes the previous one. Because QuickBooks stores
data in a database, you don't have to save a company file before you close it.
(And if you use QuickBooks Accountant edition, you can have two company files
open at the same time, as the Tip that follows explains.) The following sections
describe the different ways to open a company file.