QuickBooks 2017 All-In-One For Dummies book cover

QuickBooks 2017 All-In-One For Dummies

Author:

Stephen L. Nelson

Overview

Managing the books for a small business can be a challenging, onerous task. If you're looking to spend fewer hours hunched over multiple spreadsheets and more time focused on other aspects of your growing business, this all-in-one guide gives you everything you need to put QuickBooks to work for you. Combining eight content-rich books into one complete package, this value-priced reference provides answers to all the questions you have about how QuickBooks can manage your business finances, even the ones you didn't know to ask!

Managing the books for a small business can be a challenging, onerous task. If you're looking to spend fewer hours hunched over multiple spreadsheets and more time focused on other aspects of your growing business, this all-in-one guide gives you everything you need

to put QuickBooks to work for you. Combining eight content-rich books into one complete package, this value-priced reference provides answers to all the questions you have about how QuickBooks can manage your business finances, even the ones you didn't know to ask!

QuickBooks 2017 All-in-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

With QuickBooks 2017 your day-to-day business bookkeeping is quick and easy, but it will go even more smoothly if you employ a handful of QuickBooks user interface tricks, keyboard shortcuts, and editing tricks.

About The Author

Stephen L. Nelson, MBA, CPA, MS in Taxation, is a CPA in Redmond, Washington, where he provides accounting, business advisory, and tax planning and preparation services to small businesses. He is the bestselling author of 100-plus books about how to use computers to manage personal and business finances.

Articles From The Book

24 results

QuickBooks Articles

Cleanup Basics for Your QuickBooks Company File

When you understand what archiving in QuickBooks is all about, the process is quite straightforward. To condense the QuickBooks company file, follow these steps:

Choose the File → Utilities → Condense Data command. QuickBooks displays the first Condense Data dialog box.
Select the Transactions Before a Specific Date radio button. This option tells QuickBooks that you want to do two things: create an archival copy of the QuickBooks data file, and skinny down the working company file so that it isn’t so big. QuickBooks reduces the size of the working version of the company data file by removing old, closed transactions if you choose in Step 3 to remove transactions.
Specify the Remove Transactions Before date. To specify the date before which closed transactions should be removed, enter the date in the date box. If you want to condense the file by removing transactions on or before December 31, 2016, for example, enter 1/1/2017 in the date box. You don’t need to feel compulsive about removing a bunch of closed transactions, however. You remove closed transactions only if your QuickBooks company file is getting too big. You can easily work with a QuickBooks company file that’s 25MB, 50MB, or even 100MB (megabytes).
Although typically, you condense a QuickBooks file by removing old, closed transactions, the Condense command also creates files without transactions and files with only a specified data range of transactions. To create a file that holds lists and preferences but no transactions, select the All Transactions radio button.
By the way, you might use the All Transactions option to build a nearly empty file that you could reuse (such as for training). To create a QuickBooks file that holds a specified range of transactions, select the Transactions Outside of a Date Range radio button and then enter the dates that bookend the range in the Before and After boxes.
Click Next when you finish specifying which transactions QuickBooks should remove. QuickBooks displays the second Condense Data dialog box.
Specify how transactions should be summarized. If you want to summarize historical transactions, QuickBooks uses a second Condense Data dialog box to ask how it should summarize historical data: with a single summary journal entry, with monthly summary journal entries, or no summary at all. Select the radio button that corresponds to the summarization approach you want. (Usually, you use the second option listed — having QuickBooks create monthly summary journal entries — so you can still generate meaningful comparative monthly reports.)
Click Next when you finish specifying how QuickBooks should summarize transactions. QuickBooks displays the third Condense Data dialog box.
Specify how inventory transactions should be condensed, and click Next. If your QuickBooks file includes inventory transactions, QuickBooks recommends that you remove old inventory transactions. When QuickBooks displays the third Condense Data dialog box, you can tell QuickBooks to do just this by selecting the Summarize Inventory Transactions (Recommended) radio button. (If you don’t want to remove old transactions, select the Keep Inventory Transaction Details radio button.) When you click Next, you continue to the fourth Condense Data dialog box, which asks which transactions should considered closed.
Specify which transactions should be removed, and click Next. QuickBooks asks for a bit more information about exactly what constitutes a closed or old transaction that should be removed. You select check boxes to indicate whether transactions before the removal date should be removed even if they’re uncleared, marked To Be Printed, flagged as To Be Sent, and so on. When you click Next, you move on to the fifth Condense Data dialog box.
Specify any list cleanup that should occur, and click Next. Use the fifth Condense Data dialog box to tell QuickBooks that in addition to removing old closed transactions, it should clean up some of the lists. You can select check boxes that tell QuickBooks to remove unused accounts, unused customers, unused vendors, and so forth. By cleaning up your list through the removal of unused list items, you not only reduce the size of the company file, but also make it easier for people to work with the list. When you click Next, QuickBooks displays the sixth Condense Data dialog box. The dialog box tells you that the archival process begins with QuickBooks making a copy of the data file and that the condensation operation may take several minutes or even several hours to complete.
Click Begin Condense. QuickBooks begins the process of condensing the data file.
Back up the data file when prompted. At the beginning of the condense process, QuickBooks prompts you to back up the QuickBooks company file. Backing up the QuickBooks company file as part of a condense operation works the same as backing up the QuickBooks company file at any other time. After you back up the QuickBooks company file, QuickBooks saves an archive copy of the company file and then cleans up the working version of the company file by using your instructions. Again, as noted in the earlier steps, the cleanup process may take only a few minutes, or it may take several hours if your file is very large.

QuickBooks Articles

How QuickBooks Supports ABC

Activity-based costing (ABC) is the best new idea in accounting in the past three decades and QuickBooks is a supporter. ABC gives businesses a better way to estimate the profits of products and services, which is more important than you may think. The problem in many businesses is that overhead expenses or operating expenses don’t cleanly tie to products or services. Without good allocation of overhead or operating expenses, businesses can’t accurately determine which products make money and which don’t.

ABC addresses this problem by using the power of the computer (QuickBooks, in this example) to directly trace overhead costs to products and services. Surprisingly, ABC accomplishes this task in a pretty straightforward, simple fashion.

Okay, you’re probably saying to yourself, “All this sounds pretty good. But how does it really work with QuickBooks?” Oh, that’s right. You need to know how an ABC system works in QuickBooks, don’t you? No problem — the approach is actually really straightforward if you’ve already been using QuickBooks. In short, all you do to implement a simple ABC system in QuickBooks is what you’re doing right now. In other words, just keep on tracking your operating expenses by using a good, decent chart of accounts. That’s 90 percent of the battle. You also need to take care of just one or two minor, additional items. First, you turn on the QuickBooks Class Tracking feature. Class Tracking lets you categorize income and expense transactions as falling not just into income and expense accounts, but also into particular classes. Second, when you record an expense, you also identify the class into which the expense falls. Using classes that correspond to your activities — well, you can see that’s all it takes, right?

QuickBooks Articles

An EVA with Debt QuickBooks Example

Here’s an example of a modified EVA approach in QuickBooks. Suppose that you, the business owner, go down to the bank and take out another $100,000 loan. Then suppose that the business pays this amount out to the business owner (you) in the form of a dividend. If this transaction occurred at the beginning of the year, you get this income statement and balance sheet. This table reflects the additional loan. In other words, the only differences between the description of the business in Tables 2-1 and 2-2 and its description in these two tables are that the firm has $100,000 more debt and $100,000 less owner’s equity, and the extra debt produces another $10,000 a year of interest expense. That’s pretty straightforward, right? This table estimates the capital charge for this new, more highly leveraged firm. Once again, check out the components of the capital charge. The trade vendors, who supply $20,000 of trade credit in the form of accounts payable, don’t charge anything, so there’s no capital charge for their contribution to the firm’s capital structure. In the new, more highly leveraged firm, the bank loan charge has gone way up. Now the firm is carrying a $200,000 loan. With 10 percent interest, the capital charge on the loan rises to $20,000 annually. The final owner’s equity capital charge also changes: It drops. With the decrease in owner’s equity to just $100,000, the 20 percent capital charge decreases to $20,000 a year. When you add up all the bits and pieces, you come up with an adjusted capital charge of $40,000. Remember that this is the capital charge for the new, more highly leveraged business. For this new, more highly leveraged business, the EVA changes. The adjusted income for the business is $60,000 (calculated as the $40,000 of net income plus $20,000 of interest expense). You can calculate the EVA by subtracting the $40,000 capital charge from the $60,000 of adjusted income. The result equals $20,000 of EVA. The EVA doubles, obviously, when the business is more highly leveraged. This example shows why the more complicated EVA formula can be useful. The example recognizes more explicitly how EVA results when a firm produces income in excess of the capital charges.