If your company thinks handing out cash early is more painful than data entry, find the bills you haven’t paid and get ready to enter them in QuickBooks. As a last resort, you can ask your customers for copies of the invoices they haven’t paid or create invoices in QuickBooks to match the payments you receive. If you didn’t keep copies, you’ll have to figure out how much you sold in services and products, the discounts you applied, what you charged for shipping and other charges, and the amount of sales tax.
If customers owe you money, pull the paper copy of every unpaid invoice or statement out of your filing cabinet so you can give QuickBooks what it needs to calculate your Accounts Receivable balance. If you have petty cash lying around, count it and use that number to set up your petty cash account.Ĭustomer balances. You’ll need them to enter transactions, as described in the upcoming chapters. Gather deposit slips and your checkbook register to identify the transactions that haven’t yet cleared in your bank accounts. For each bank account you use in your business (checking, savings, money market, petty cash, and so on), find the bank statements with statement dates as close to-but earlier than-the start date for your QuickBooks file. Besides, QuickBooks sets the date in these files to, which makes transactions later than you or your vendors would like.Ĭash balances. They come with accounts, customers, vendors, and transactions (such as checks, invoices, and purchase orders). (If your company file is open, choose File → Close to display the No Company Open window.) If you botch your experiment, you can always reinstall the sample files from the QuickBooks CD.ĭon’t try to use these sample files as your company file. To experiment with QuickBooks features before you put them in production, in either the “Welcome to QuickBooks” window or the No Company Open window, click “Open a sample file”, and then choose the sample file you want. QuickBooks comes with several sample files: one for a basic product-based business, another for a basic service-based business, and several more for more specialized pursuits like contracting, consulting, manufacturing, law firms, and so on.
You don’t have to use your real company file as a guinea pig for QuickBooks features you’ve never used. GEM IN THE ROUGH: Experimenting with a Sample File But unlike the reunion, you can skip parts of the Interview, leave it at any time (once QuickBooks creates the company file), or return to it when you’re better prepared for the interrogation. The EasyStep Interview is kind of like a family reunion, where you’re asked lots of questions you don’t want to answer. The EasyStep Interview tries to make creating a company file as painless as possible, but the process isn’t pain free.
By answering a few questions on the QuickBooks Find-a-ProAdvisor website ( you can locate someone in your area to help you get started. If you plan to do without an accountant but you want some help setting up your company file, once you get past the Welcome to QuickBooks screen, you can choose Help → Find A Local Expert. Accountants well-versed in QuickBooks can create a flawless company file without breaking a sweat. You’ll not only save untold hours of tedium and confusion, but you’ll also feel confident that your books are set up properly. If you don’t know much about bookkeeping or accounting, the price of a few hours of your accountant’s time is a valuable investment.
The proud owners of brand-new businesses face a dilemma: They have more important things to do than muddle around setting up a company file in QuickBooks, but money is usually as short as free time. UP TO SPEED: The Fastest Way to a New Company File