QuickBooks 2017 For Dummies. Nelson Stephen L.

in a couple of hours in most cases, so he or she can do it (or help you do it) much faster than you can on your own.

      ❯❯ Another (a third) hour or so of tutoring from your CPA should mean that you get enough help to record all your usual transactions.

      With just this help, you can find out how to pay your bills, invoice customers exactly the way you want, and produce reports. I used to pooh-pooh this kind of hand-holding, but the older (and, I hope, wiser) I get, the more I see that business owners and bookkeepers benefit from this up-front help. A bit of planning and expert advice in the beginning can save you a whole lot of trouble later.

Chapter 3

      Populating QuickBooks Lists

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      Adding items to the Item list

      Adding employees to the Employee list

      Adding new customers and jobs

      Adding new vendors

      Understanding and using the other lists

      Organizing, printing, and exporting lists

      Dealing with the Chart of Accounts list

      QuickBooks Setup (which I discuss at some length in Chapter 2) doesn’t actually get QuickBooks completely ready to use. You also need to enter additional information about your products, employees, customers, and vendors (and a handful of other items) into lists. In this chapter, I describe how you create and work with these lists. I also describe how you clean up some of the accounting messiness created when you enter information into these lists.

      The Magic and Mystery of Items

      The first QuickBooks list you need to finish setting up is the Item list – the list of stuff you buy and sell. Before you start adding to your Item list, however, I need to tell you that QuickBooks isn’t very smart about its view of what you buy and sell. It thinks that anything you stick on a sales invoice or a purchase order is something you’re selling.

      If you sell colorful coffee mugs, for example, you probably figure (and correctly so) that you need to add descriptions of each of these items to the Item list. If you add freight charges to an invoice, however, QuickBooks thinks that you’re adding another mug. And if you add sales tax to an invoice, well, guess what? QuickBooks again thinks that you’re adding another mug.

      This wacky definition of items is confusing at first. But just remember one thing, and you’ll be okay. You aren’t the one who’s stupid: QuickBooks is. No, I’m not saying that QuickBooks is a bad program. It’s a wonderful accounting program and a great tool. What I’m saying is that QuickBooks is only a dumb computer program; it isn’t an artificial-intelligence program. It doesn’t pick up on the little subtleties of business – such as the fact that even though you charge customers for freight, you aren’t really in the shipping business.

      Each entry in the invoice or purchase order – the mugs that you sell, the subtotal, the discount, the freight charges, and the sales tax – is an item. Yes, I know this setup is weird, but getting used to the wackiness now makes the discussions that follow much easier to understand.