FIGURE 1-8: The Make General Journal Entries window, showing a simple trial balance.

For more information about how to record a journal entry by using the Make General Journal Entries window, see Book 4, Chapter 1. If you want to try this on your own with no further instruction from me, choose the Company ⇒ Make General Journal Entries command. When QuickBooks displays the Make General Journal Entries window, shown in Figure 1-8, use the Account, Debit, and Credit columns to record your journal entry.

      If the idea of making a journal entry terrifies the heck out of you, you may find yourself in a bit of a pickle. You need to become comfortable working with double-entry bookkeeping to set up QuickBooks at a time other than at the beginning of the year. This means, unfortunately, that if you’re setting up QuickBooks sometime during the middle of the year, you must enter a general journal entry to fix the weirdness that the QuickBooks Setup creates. If you don’t know how double-entry bookkeeping works — if debits and credits aren’t your friends — you probably need to get somebody’s help. I suggest that you call your CPA or some other friend who truly understands accounting. Get them to come over and enter the last part of the trial balance for you by using the Make General Journal Entries window.

      Note: This project shouldn’t be a big one if you decide to call your CPA. If they comes over to your office, and if you have the trial balance ready, it should take them only a few minutes to enter the necessary general journal entry. Perhaps you can buy them a nice lunch, and that will settle the score.

      A real-life example to finish

      Okay, true confessions. The example I give in the preceding section? You probably won’t be lucky enough that your starting trial balance journal entry will be so simple. You probably will have to deal with a bank account and with account balances in your accounts receivable, accounts payable, or inventory accounts. Now I show you how this process works.

Suppose that you have the trial balances shown in Table 1-2. Note that in this example (unlike the preceding example), the first account shown — the one with $5,000 — is a bank account.

      Here’s the tricky part of recording this trial balance. You don’t need — I repeat, don’t need — to record all this trial-balance information through a journal entry. Because the bank account, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and inventory portions have already been recorded if you added customer, vendor, item, and bank account information during the QuickBooks Setup process, you just need to enter the rest of the trial balance.

Because you won’t be recording all the trial balance, however, your journal entry not only won’t match your actual trial balance, but also won’t balance. To make it balance, therefore, you plug the difference into an account that QuickBooks supplies for just this sort of bookkeeping madness: the Opening Balance Equity account. Figure 1-9 shows this journal entry.

TABLE 1-2 A Trial Balance