QuickBooks 2022 All-in-One For Dummies. Stephen L. Nelson
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inventory items that you use repeatedly. The customer master file, for example, stores a customer’s name and address, phone number, and the contact person’s name (if different).
Running the QuickBooks Setup Wizard
After you install the QuickBooks program, the installation program may start QuickBooks automatically and then start QuickBooks Setup. You can also start QuickBooks Setup by starting the QuickBooks program the same way that you start any program and then choosing File ⇒ New Company.
Getting the big welcome
The QuickBooks Desktop Setup screen of QuickBooks Setup (see Figure 1-1) appears when you choose File ⇒ New Company. The screen gets you started creating a new company file within QuickBooks. The screen has two radio buttons to choose between. The For Myself (I’m the Admin) button enables you to set up the new file as the admin, in which case you use your email address to create the file. The For Someone Else button enables you to set up the file on behalf of the admin, in which case you use that person’s email address to set up the file.
FIGURE 1-1: The QuickBooks Setup Desktop window.
The Other Options drop-down list (refer to Figure 1-1) allows you to choose the advanced setup option, which walks you through a bunch of screens full of information that let you rather tightly specify how the company file that QuickBooks sets up should look.
Supplying company information
The first few screens of the EasyStep Interview collect several important pieces of general information about your business, including your company name and the firm’s legal name, your company address, the industry in which you operate, your federal tax ID number, the first month of the fiscal year (typically, January), the type of income tax form that your firm uses to report to the IRS, and the industry or type of company that you’re operating (retail, service, and so forth). The first screen of the EasyStep Interview is shown in Figure 1-2.
FIGURE 1-2: The first screen of the EasyStep Interview collects general company information.
After collecting this general company information, QuickBooks creates the company data file that stores your firm’s financial information. QuickBooks suggests a default name or a QuickBooks data file based on the company name (see Figure 1-3). All you need to do is accept the suggested name and the suggested folder location (unless you want to save the data file in the Documents folder, which isn’t a bad idea).
FIGURE 1-3: The Filename for New Company dialog box.
Customizing QuickBooks
After QuickBooks collects the general company information mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the EasyStep Interview asks you some very specific questions about how you run your business so that it can set the QuickBooks preferences. Preferences in effect turn various accounting features of QuickBooks on or off, thereby controlling how the program works and looks. Here are the sorts of questions that the EasyStep Interview asks to set the QuickBooks preferences:
Does your firm maintain inventory?
Do you want to track the inventory that you buy and sell?
Do you collect sales tax from your customers?
Do you want to use sales orders to track customer orders and back orders?
Do you want to use QuickBooks to help with your employee payroll?
Do you need to track multiple currencies within QuickBooks because you deal with customers and vendors in other countries, and do these people regularly have the audacity to pay or invoice you in a currency different from the one your country uses?
Would you like to track the time that you or your employees spend on jobs or projects for customers?
How do you want to handle bills and payments (enter the checks directly, or enter the bills first and the payments later)?
Setting your start date
Perhaps the key decision that you make in setting up any accounting system is the day on which you begin using your new system. This day is called the conversion date. Typically, you want to begin using an accounting system on the first day of the year or the first day of a new month. Accordingly, one other big question you’re asked is about the conversion date. You’re prompted to identify the start date by using the dialog box shown in Figure 1-4.
FIGURE 1-4: The EasyStep Interview dialog box that lets you select the start date.
At any other time, you also enter year-to-date income and year-to-date expense account balances. Typically, you have this year-to-date income and expense information available only at the start of the month. For this reason, the only other feasible start date that you can pick is the start of a month.
In this case, you get year-to-date income amounts through the end of the previous month from your previous accounting system. If you’ve been using Sage 50 Accounting, for example, get year-to-date income and expense amounts from Sage.
After you’ve provided the start date, supplied the basic company information, identified most of your accounting preferences, and identified the date on which you want to start using QuickBooks, you’re almost done.