
QuickBooks 2024 All-in-One For Dummies
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QuickBooks 2024 All-in-One For Dummies is the solution small business owners and managers are seeking. This high-value reference combines 8 content-rich mini-books into one complete package, providing the answers you need to get the most out of the 2024 version of QuickBooks. You'll learn the key features of QuickBooks and small business accounting, including setting up the software, understanding double-entry bookkeeping, invoicing customers, paying vendors, tracking inventory, creating reports, and beyond. Plus, you'll discover how you can use cloud storage to access your information on your smartphone, making running a small business that much more manageable.
* Sign up for QuickBooks software, set up your accounts, and customize your preferences
* Learn the basics of accounting and bookkeeping, and make sure you're doing it right
* Discover advanced features of QuickBooks that will help you run your business smoothly and efficiently
* Save money by confidently managing your finances yourself
This beginner-friendly Dummies guide makes it a breeze for small business owners, managers, and employees to implement QuickBooks at work.
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Content
Book 1: An Accounting Primer 7
Chapter 1: Principles of Accounting 9
Chapter 2: Double-Entry Bookkeeping 29
Chapter 3: Special Accounting Problems 49
Book 2: Getting Ready to Use QuickBooks 73
Chapter 1: Setting Up QuickBooks 75
Chapter 2: Loading the Master File Lists 93
Chapter 3: Fine-Tuning QuickBooks 117
Book 3: Bookkeeping Chores 151
Chapter 1: Invoicing Customers 153
Chapter 2: Paying Vendors 189
Chapter 3: Tracking Inventory and Items 209
Chapter 4: Managing Cash and Bank Accounts 241
Chapter 5: Paying Employees 273
Book 4: Accounting Chores 285
Chapter 1: For Accountants Only 287
Chapter 2: Preparing Financial Statements and Reports 303
Chapter 3: Preparing a Budget 327
Chapter 4: Using Activity-Based Costing 341
Chapter 5: Setting Up Project and Job Costing Systems 357
Book 5: Financial Management 369
Chapter 1: Ratio Analysis 371
Chapter 2: Economic Value Added Analysis 389
Chapter 3: Capital Budgeting in a Nutshell 403
Book 6: Business Plans 419
Chapter 1: Profit-Volume-Cost Analysis 421
Chapter 2: Creating a Business Plan Forecast 441
Chapter 3: Writing a Business Plan 479
Book 7: Care and Maintenance 493
Chapter 1: Administering QuickBooks 4950
Chapter 2: Protecting Your Data 515
Chapter 3: Troubleshooting 535
Book 8: Appendixes 541
Appendix A: A Crash Course in Excel 543
Appendix B: Glossary of Accounting and Financial Terms 559
Index 589
Chapter 1
Principles of Accounting
IN THIS CHAPTER
Figuring out the purpose of accounting
Taking a look at common financial statements
Understanding the philosophy of accounting
Discovering income tax accounting and reporting
Any discussion of how to use QuickBooks to manage your business better begins with a discussion of the basics of accounting. For this reason, in this chapter and the next two, I attempt to provide the same information that you'd receive in an introductory college accounting course. I tailor the entire discussion, of course, to QuickBooks and the small-business environment. What you'll read about here and in the next two chapters of this book pretty much describes how accounting works in a small-business setting when you're using QuickBooks.
If you've had some experience with accounting, if you know how to read an income statement and balance sheet, or if you know how to construct a journal entry, you don't need to read this chapter or the next ones. But if you're new to accounting and business bookkeeping, take the time to read this chapter carefully. I start by giving you a high-level overview of the purpose of accounting. Then I review the common financial statements that any accounting system worth its salt produces. I also discuss some of the important principles of accounting and the philosophy of accounting. Finally, I talk a little bit about income tax law and tax accounting.
Looking at the Purpose of Accounting
In the movie Creator, Peter O'Toole plays an eccentric professor. At one point, O'Toole's character attempts to talk a young student into working as an unpaid research assistant. When the student protests, noting that he needs 15 credit hours, O'Toole creates a special 15-credit independent-study course named "Introduction to the Big Picture." In the next section, I describe the "big picture" of accounting. At its core, accounting makes perfect, logical sense.
The big picture
The most important thing to understand about accounting is that it provides financial information to stakeholders. Stakeholders are the people who do business with or interact with a firm; they include managers, employees, investors, banks, vendors, government authorities, and agencies that may tax a firm. Stakeholders and their information requirements deserve a bit more discussion. Why? Because the information needs of these stakeholders determine what an accounting system must do.
Managers, investors, and entrepreneurs
The first category of stakeholders includes the firm's managers, investors, and entrepreneurs. This group needs financial information to determine whether a business is making money. This group also wants any information that gives insight into whether a business is growing or contracting and how healthy or sick it is. To fulfill its obligations and duties, this group often needs detailed information. A manager or entrepreneur may want to know which customers are particularly profitable - or unprofitable. An active investor may want to know which product lines are growing or contracting.
A related set of information requirements concerns asset and liability record keeping. An asset is something that the firm owns, such as cash, inventory, or equipment. A liability is some debt or obligation that the firm owes, such as bank loans and accounts payable.
Obviously, someone at a firm - perhaps a manager, bookkeeper, or accountant - needs to have very detailed records of the amount of cash that the firm has in its bank accounts, the inventory that the firm has in its warehouse or on its shelves, and the equipment that the firm owns and uses in its operations.
If you look over the preceding two or three paragraphs, nothing I've said is particularly surprising. It makes sense, right? Someone who works in a business, manages a business, or actively invests in a business needs good general information about the financial affairs of the firm and, in many cases, very detailed information about important assets (such as cash) and liabilities (such as bank loans).
External creditors
A second category of stakeholders includes outside firms that lend money to a business and credit-reporting agencies that supply information to these lenders. Banks want to know about the financial affairs and financial condition of a firm before lending money, for example. The accounting system needs to produce the financial information that a bank requires to consider a loan request.
What information do lenders want? Lenders want to know that a business is profitable and enjoys a positive cash flow. Profits and positive cash flows allow a business to repay debt easily. A bank or other lender also wants to see assets that could be liquidated, in a worst-case scenario, to pay a loan - and other debts that may represent a claim on the firm's assets.
Vendors also typically require financial information from a firm. A vendor often lends money to a firm by extending trade credit. What's noteworthy about this fact is that vendors sometimes require special accounting. One category of vendors that a company such as John Wiley & Sons, Inc., deals with is its authors. To pay an author the royalty that they're entitled to, Wiley puts in a fair amount of work to calculate royalty-per-unit amounts and then reports and remits these amounts to each author.
Other firms sometimes have similar financial reporting requirements for vendors. Franchisees (such as the person who owns and operates the local McDonald's) pay a franchise fee based on revenue. Retailers may perform special accounting and reporting to enjoy rebates and incentives from the manufacturers of the products that they sell.
Government agencies
Predictable stakeholders that require financial information from a business also include the federal and state government agencies that have jurisdiction over the firm. Every business in the United States needs to report on its revenue, expenses, and profits so that it can correctly calculate income tax due to the federal government (and often, the state government, too) and then pay that tax.
Firms with employees must also report to the federal and state governments on wages paid to those employees and pay payroll taxes based on metrics, such as number of employees, wages paid to employees, and unemployment benefits claimed by past employees.
Providing this sort of financial information to government agencies represents a key duty of a firm's accounting system.
Business form generation
In addition to the financial reporting described in the preceding paragraphs, accounting systems typically perform a key task for businesses: producing business forms. An accounting system almost always produces the checks needed to pay vendors, for example. In addition, an accounting system prepares the invoices and payroll checks. More sophisticated accounting systems, such as those used by large firms, prepare many other business forms, including purchase orders, monthly customer statements, credit memos to customers, and sales receipts.
Every accounting function that I've described so far is performed ably by each version of QuickBooks: QuickBooks Simple Start, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise.
Reviewing the Common Financial Statements
With the background information just provided, I'm ready to talk about some of the common financial statements or accounting reports that an accounting system like QuickBooks produces. If you understand which reports you want your accounting system to produce, you should find it much easier to collect the raw data necessary to prepare these reports.
In the following sections, I describe the three principal financial statements: the income statement, the balance sheet, and the statement of cash flows. I also briefly describe a fourth, catch-all category: accounting reports.
Don't worry - I go through this material slowly. You need to understand what financial statements your accounting systems are supposed to provide and what data these financial statements supply.
Income statement
Perhaps the most important financial statement that an accounting system produces is the income statement, also known as a profit and loss statement. An income statement summarizes a firm's revenue and expenses for a particular period. Revenue represents amounts that a business earns by providing goods and services to its customers. Expenses represent amounts that a firm spends providing those goods and services. If a business can provide goods or services to customers for revenue that exceeds its expenses, the firm earns a profit. If expenses exceed revenue, obviously, the firm suffers a loss.
To show you how all this works - and it's really pretty simple - take a look at Tables 1-1 and 1-2. Table 1-1 summarizes the sales that an imaginary business enjoys. Table 1-2 summarizes the expenses that the same business incurs for the same period. These two tables provide all the information necessary to construct an income statement.
TABLE 1-1 A Sales...
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