QuickBooks^® 2017 All-in-One For Dummies^®

      Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

      Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

      Published simultaneously in Canada

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      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955393

      ISBN: 978-1-119-28134-4 (pbk); 978-1-119-28135-1 (ebk); 978-1-119-28136-8 (ebk)

      QuickBooks® 2017 All-in-One For Dummies®

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      Introduction

      Few people read introductions to reference books, so I’ll make this very brief. I just want to tell you which versions of QuickBooks this book works for, what’s in the reference, what it assumes about your existing skills, and what conventions I use.

      About This Book

      The desktop version of QuickBooks comes in several flavors, including QuickBooks Self-Employed, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. This reference talks about QuickBooks 2017 Enterprise Solutions, which is a superset of QuickBooks Premier and QuickBooks Pro. If you’re using QuickBooks Self-Employed or QuickBooks Online, you shouldn’t use this book. Sorry.

      On the other hand, even though this book is written for QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, if you’re using QuickBooks Premier or QuickBooks Pro, don’t worry. You’re just fine with this book. And don’t freak out if you’re using some version of QuickBooks that’s very similar to QuickBooks 2017, such as QuickBooks 2016 or QuickBooks 2018. Although this reference is about QuickBooks 2017, it also works just fine for the 2015, 2016, and probably 2018 versions of QuickBooks because QuickBooks is a very mature product at this point. The changes from one year to the next are modest. This means that if you’re using QuickBooks 2016, stuff may look a little different if you closely compare the images in this book with what you see on your screen, but the information in this reference will still apply to your situation.

      Note, too, that specialty versions of QuickBooks, such as QuickBooks Accountant’s Edition and QuickBooks Contractor, also work almost identically to QuickBooks Premier.

      

If you use QuickBooks Pro and see some whistle or bell that you really want to use but that isn’t available in your version of QuickBooks, you’ll know that you should upgrade to the Premier version or Enterprise Solutions version of QuickBooks.

      

The bottom line? Yes, QuickBooks comes in several flavors. Yes, Intuit publishes new editions of its QuickBooks products every year. But you can use this book for any recent version of QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise Solutions.

      To make the best use of your time and energy, you should know about the conventions I use in this book:

       ✓ When I want you to type something such as Jennifer, it’s in bold letters.

       ✓ By the way, except for passwords, you don’t have to worry about the case of the stuff you type in QuickBooks. If I tell you to type Jennifer, you can type JENNIFER. Or you can follow poet e e cummings’s lead and type jennifer.

       ✓ Whenever I tell you to choose a command from a menu, I say something like Choose Lists ⇒ Items, which simply means to first choose the Lists menu and then choose Items. The ⇒ separates one part of the command from the next part.

       ✓ You can choose menus and commands and select dialog-box elements with the mouse. Just click the thing that you want to select.

       ✓ While I’m on the subject of conventions, let me also mention something about QuickBooks conventions, because it turns out that there’s really no good place to point this out. QuickBooks doesn’t use document windows the same way that other Windows programs do. Instead, it locks the active window into place and then displays a list of windows in its Navigator pane, which is like another little window. To move to a listed window, you click it.

      

You can tell QuickBooks to use windows like every other program does, however, by choosing View ⇒ Multiple Windows. You can even remove the Navigator pane by choosing View ⇒ Open Window List.

      Foolish Assumptions

      I’m making only three assumptions about your QuickBooks and accounting skills: