Budgeting and Planning

As you’ve no doubt noticed in business and in life, the activities that cost money almost always seem to outnumber those that bring money in. Most companies want to make money and most nonprofits want to do the most with the funds they have, so budgeting and planning are essential business activities.

Like any kind of plan, a budget is an estimate of what’s going to happen. Your actual results will

Working with Sales Tax

Sales tax can be complicated, particularly in states where the number of tax authorities has exploded. You might have to pay sales taxes to several agencies, each with its own rules about when and how much. QuickBooks’ sales tax

features can’t eliminate this drudgery, but they can help you pay the right tax authorities the right amounts at the right time—and that’s

Managing Inventory

As you record inventory purchases and sales in QuickBooks, the program keeps track of your inventory, just as the point-of-service system at the grocery store does when a cashier scans items. This chapter begins by explaining how to

turn on QuickBooks’ inventory features and set up inventory items in your company file so the program can work this magic.

Unless you practice just-in-time inventory management, you need inventory in your

Managing QuickBooks Files

When company ledgers were made of paper, you had to be careful not to tear the pages or spill coffee on them. Today’s electronic books require their own sort of care. Protecting your QuickBooks files is essential, not only because

Keeping Track of Financial Tasks

Attention to detail. Follow-through. These are a couple of the things that keep customers coming back for more. Following through on promises and calling to check that an issue was resolved successfully is good business. But sending reorder brochures after customers have already

Performing Year End Tasks

As if your typical workday isn’t hectic enough, the end of the year brings with it an assortment of additional bookkeeping and accounting tasks. As long as you’ve kept on top of your bookkeeping during the year, you can delegate most of these year-end tasks to QuickBooks with just a few clicks. (If you shrugged off your data entry during the year, even the mighty QuickBooks can’t help.) This chapter describes the tasks you have to perform at the end of each fiscal year (or other fiscal period, for that matter) and how to delegate them to QuickBooks.

Making Journal Entries

Most of the time, you don’t need to know double-entry accounting (page xxi) to use QuickBooks. When you write checks, receive payments, and perform many other tasks in QuickBooks, the program creates transactions that unobtrusively handle the double-entry accounting