QuickBooks 2017 All-In-One For Dummies
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!
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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.
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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.
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QuickBooks
You can use QuickBooks for an EVA analysis. Here are two pointers business owners who may want to use EVA analysis should consider to think about the economics of their businesses.
EVA analysis is most useful to business owners and managers — or at least to owners and managers of small and medium-size firms — as a thinking tool.
If you are using QuickBooks to help you put a strategy into practice, there are a few things you may want to consider. Be sure that you understand these key points:
Know the three strategies. Usually, a firm can have only one of three business strategies:
Cost-based strategy
Differentiation-based strategy
Focus-based strategy
Pick a strategy.
QuickBooks
To display shortcut menus in QuickBooks 2017, right-click. In a register, select and right-click a specific transaction; in a list, right-click an item; in a form, display a transaction and right-click a blank area of the form.
QuickBooks displays a shortcut menu of common commands for each particular transaction, item, or window.
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.
QuickBooks
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.
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.
QuickBooks
To add a noninventory part — which is a tangible good that you sell but for which you don’t track inventory — display QuickBook’s New Item window and choose Non-Inventory Part from the Type drop-down list.When QuickBooks displays the Non-Inventory Part version of the New Item window, give the noninventory part a name or code by using the Item Name/Number box.
QuickBooks
QuickBooks provides a couple of handy commands and tools that you can use to change the prices that you charge customers for your products and services. Keep reading to discover more about both of these handy aids.
Using the Change Item Prices command
The Change Item Prices command, which appears on the Customers menu, displays the Change Item Prices dialog box.
QuickBooks makes your life easier by giving you and your accountant everything you need to keep things in order. However, sometimes a workaround is in order. Accountants often want to see the rights that particular users have, especially if they’re auditing you as part of annual closings. (You may be audited if the bank wants audited financial statements, for example.
QuickBooks
Sometimes, you need only a single computer and a single copy of QuickBooks, even though you have several employees using QuickBooks. If a small business has only an administrative assistant and the owner accessing a QuickBooks data file, for example, one copy of QuickBooks running on a single personal computer may be all that’s required.
QuickBooks
Business owners often find themselves confronting complexities. Luckily, QuickBooks has what you need. You don’t need to be an accountant or an experienced bookkeeper to understand the uncollectible accounts. Take a look.
Journal Entry 3: Recording an Allowance for Uncollectible Accounts
Account
Debit
Credit
Bad-debt expense
$100
Allowance for uncollectible A/R
$100
Journal Entry 3 records an estimate of the uncollectible portion of accounts receivable.
QuickBooks
QuickBooks has a setting that lets you fine-tune the service connection. The My Preferences tab of the Service Connection Preferences dialog box provides two check boxes you can select to control how QuickBooks works when you’re making web connections. One check box gives you the option of saving downloaded files.
QuickBooks
The Fonts & Numbers tab lets you change the font for selected pieces of QuickBooks report information. Use the Change Font For list box to select the bit of report information that you want to change. The Fonts & Numbers tab of the Modify Report dialog boxAfter this selection, click the Change Font button to display a dialog box.
QuickBooks
The My Preferences tab of the Accounting Preferences dialog box in QuickBooks 2017 provides a single option: You can tell QuickBooks you want it to autofill information when recording a general journal entry. Setting the Bills and Calendar Preferences can help you make quicker work of bookkeeping.
Setting the Bills Preferences
If you display the Preferences dialog box and click the Bills icon, you can set company-level preferences for handling vendor bills.
QuickBooks
QuickBooks can help you write a white-paper business plan. People often write a white-paper business plan when they know that they need a strategic plan but don’t want to make the hard decisions necessary for a strategic plan. The person in this conundrum writes a lengthy white-paper business plan to camouflage the absent strategic plan.
QuickBooks
QuickBooks 2017 allows for integrated payment processing. The Payments preferences provide several check boxes and links you can use to control the way QuickBooks handles payments.The Receive Payments check boxes, for example, let you indicate that you want to automatically apply and automatically calculate payments, as well as use the Undeposited Funds account as a temporary holding account for customer payments.
Fortunately, most of the inventory accounting that goes on in a business gets handled automatically by QuickBooks. When you purchase an inventory item by writing a check or recording an accounts payable bill, for example, QuickBooks automatically adjusts your inventory accounts for both the dollar value of the inventory and the quantity of the items.
You can use the following QuickBooks 2017 PC keyboard shortcuts to help make your day-to-day small-business accounting easier and faster.
Press This PC Shortcut
QuickBooks Does This
Alt+S
Saves a transaction
Alt+N
Saves a transaction and goes to a new transaction
Ctrl+A
Displays the Chart of Accounts window
C
QuickBooks
Quickbooks can help you with the budgeting process. Budgeting can be a very useful tool, but it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. Here are a handful of comments on the matter:
Budgeting is an example of the old phrase “Plan your work and then work your plan.” Budgets aren’t handcuffs. Budgets aren’t straitjackets.
QuickBooks
Keep in mind that your problem may not be a problem with QuickBooks at all, but a problem with your computer and its hardware or with Microsoft Windows. The Microsoft product-support website, which is phenomenally rich in information.If your problem stems from the hardware or the operating system, you can consult the hardware or software maker’s product-support website for troubleshooting information.
You can learn to navigate the QuickBooks 2017 software very quickly if you employ some of the following interface navigation tricks:
To move quickly to a specific list-box entry, press the letter. Press the s key to move to the first list entry that begins with the letter s, for example.
To select a list-box entry shown within a dialog box and simultaneously choose a suggested command button for the active dialog box (probably the OK button), double-click the entry.
QuickBooks
Tracking inventory in a manufacturing firm is more difficult than in other types of businesses. When you boil down everything to its essence in QuickBooks, the problem stems from a couple of tricky accounting requirements:
In a manufacturing environment, the manufacturer combines raw materials items into finished-goods items.
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