id="c02_fig_0005"/>FIGURE 2-5: The Get All the Details into QuickBooks dialog box.
FIGURE 2-6: The Add the People You Do Business With dialog box.
FIGURE 2-7: The Add the Products and Services You Sell dialog box.
FIGURE 2-8: The Add Your Bank Accounts dialog box.
If you didn’t register during the installation process, at some point after QuickBooks starts, you see a message box that asks whether you want to register QuickBooks. If you don’t register, you can use the product roughly a few times, and then – whammo! – the program locks up, and you can no longer access your files. Either you register it, or you can’t use it. I don’t like being forced to do something, but getting worked up about having to register QuickBooks is a waste of time.
The simplest option is to just register when you see that message. Here’s how: When QuickBooks displays the message box that asks whether you want to register, click the Online button to register online, or click the Phone button to register over the phone. If you go with the Phone option, QuickBooks displays another dialog box that gives you a telephone number to call and provides a space for you to enter your registration number.
The Rest of the Story
In the preceding paragraphs of this chapter, I describe how you prepare for and then step through the QuickBooks Setup process. When QuickBooks Setup is over, though, you need to take care of three other little jobs:
❯❯ You need to describe in detail your inventory, your customer receivables, and (if you chose to track vendor bills you owe) your vendor payables.
❯❯ You need to describe your current business finances, including any year-to-date revenue and year-to-date expenses that aren’t recorded as part of getting your customer receivables and vendor payables entered into QuickBooks.
❯❯ If you want to use accrual-basis accounting, you need to make an adjustment.
These chores aren’t time-consuming, but they’re the three most complicated tasks that you need to do to set up QuickBooks. (If you aren’t sure what the big deal is about accrual-basis accounting, I respectfully suggest that you take a break here and read Appendix B.)
To set up the inventory records, you just identify the item counts you hold in inventory, as described in Chapter 3.
To set up your customer receivables and (if necessary) vendor payables, you first need to enter customer invoices that were prepared before the conversion date but that are still uncollected at conversion, as described in Chapter 4. Similarly, you may need to enter vendor payables that were incurred prior to the conversion date but that are still unpaid at conversion.
I talk about this stuff more in Chapter 3, so if you’re still okay with doing some more installation and setup work, go ahead and flip there. However …
Should You Get Your Accountant’s Help?
So should you get help from your accountant? Oh, shoot, I don’t know. If you follow my directions carefully (both in this chapter and the next), and your business financial affairs aren’t wildly complex, I think you can probably figure out all this stuff on your own.
Having said that, however, I suggest that you at least think about getting your accountant’s help at this juncture. Your accountant can do a much better job of giving you advice that may be specific to your situation. In many cases, your accountant can give you beginning trial balance amounts that agree with your tax returns. He or she probably knows your business and can keep you from making a terrible mess of things, just in case you don’t follow my directions carefully.
Just so you know: One of the things that I (as a CPA) do for my clients is help them set up QuickBooks. Because I do this, I can give you a couple of pieces of useful information about getting a CPA’s help in setting up:
❯❯ Your CPA (assuming that he or she already knows QuickBooks) should be able to help you through the setup process in a couple of hours in most cases, so he or she can do it (or help you do it) much faster than you can on your own.
❯❯ Another (a third) hour or so of tutoring from your CPA should mean that you get enough help to record all your usual transactions.
With just this help, you can find out how to pay your bills, invoice customers exactly the way you want, and produce reports. I used to pooh-pooh this kind of hand-holding, but the older (and, I hope, wiser) I get, the more I see that business owners and bookkeepers benefit from this up-front help. A bit of planning and expert advice in the beginning can save you a whole lot of trouble later.
Chapter 3
Populating QuickBooks Lists
IN THIS CHAPTER
Adding items to the Item list
Adding employees to the Employee list
Adding new customers and jobs
Adding new vendors
Understanding and using the other lists
Organizing, printing, and exporting lists
Dealing with the Chart of Accounts list
QuickBooks Setup (which I discuss at some length in Chapter 2) doesn’t actually get QuickBooks completely ready to use. You also need to enter additional information about your products, employees, customers, and vendors (and a handful of other items) into lists. In this chapter, I describe how you create and work with these lists. I also describe how you clean up some of the accounting messiness created when you enter information into these lists.
The Magic and Mystery of Items
The first QuickBooks list you need to finish setting up is the Item list – the list of stuff you buy and sell. Before you start adding to your Item list, however, I need to tell you that QuickBooks isn’t very smart about its view of what you buy and sell. It thinks that anything you stick on a sales invoice or a purchase order is something you’re selling.
If you sell colorful coffee mugs, for example, you probably figure (and correctly so) that you need to add descriptions of each of these items to the Item list. If you add freight charges to an invoice, however, QuickBooks thinks that you’re adding another mug. And if you add sales tax to an invoice, well, guess what? QuickBooks again thinks that you’re adding another mug.
This wacky definition of items is confusing at first. But just remember one thing, and you’ll be okay. You aren’t the one who’s stupid: QuickBooks is. No, I’m not saying that QuickBooks is a bad program. It’s a wonderful accounting program and a great tool. What I’m saying is that QuickBooks is only a dumb
