So where do you start?
Pardon me for answering a
question with a question, but where are you
coming from? Have you been using
another accounting package? Are you
doing your bookkeeping by hand, or perhaps
starting a new company? Are you now
near the end of your fiscal year, or in the
middle? The first step in most cases is
the same: get away from your
computer! You need to gather a lot of
information.
To work in QuickBooks, you
need to be able to work in Windows, and the
instructions here assume that you can.
Full instructions for all of the
operations would include too much detail
here. Expert proficiency is not
required, but the more common controls must
be understood. Chapter 23 introduces
Windows 95, and Chapter 24 can get you
started in Windows 3.1. At the end of
each of these chapters are a few “pearls,”
useful information that it not widely known.
New company
: Before you take XE
"company:new" XE "new
company" money out of a business, it is
usually necessary to put assets into the
business. Existing vehicles, equipment,
et cetera, may be contributed, but more often
the contribution is cash. These assets
may have been contributed by the owners, or
loaned by the owners or others, creating a
liability. Money may have been paid
directly by the owners for items purchased by
the business. Income tax laws may view
some of these as current expenses, but most
must be shown as capital investment, usually
to be depreciated or amortized. So you
start by rounding up all the documents about
your assets.
Existing company,
and you XE "existing company" XE "company:existing" have been keeping your books with Quicken: QuickBooks makes the conversion directly. But QuickBooks has far wider capability than Quicken. Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable will need some accommodation, for existing transactions. The conversion will build the chart of accounts, but it should be reviewed before you begin entering data into QuickBooks. The Quickbooks manuals (paper or on-disk) have good instructions for this situation, and they are not copied here.
Existing company
, and you have kept your books with some
other computer program: QuickBooks has very
limited capability to bring in data from
other systems. QuickBooks uses its own
form of tab-delimited file, called Intuit
Interchange Format (IIF.) If lists,
such as customer lists, can be converted into
this format, they can be imported.
Transactions can also be imported, but only
if they can be made available in IIF.
Information about IIF may be found in Help,
under Managing
QuickBooks/Transactions. A chart of
accounts could be brought in, but this will
not pay unless it is very extensive.
Existing Company,
and you have kept your books by hand: It's like going from walking to driving. You need some time to learn how; then it is all saving time. You have an existing chart of accounts, but it may need some adaptation. Particularly, if you have kept to a few accounts to save labor, you probably will gain by using more accounts in QuickBooks.
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