QuickBooks 2006

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into five mostly coherent parts.

Part I: Quickly into QuickBooks

Part I covers some upfront tasks that you need to take care of before you can start using QuickBooks. I promise I don’t waste your time here. I just want to make sure that you get off on the right foot.

Part II: Daily Entry Tasks

The second part of this book explains how you use QuickBooks for your daily financial record keeping: preparing customer invoices, recording sales, and paying bills — that kind of stuff.
Just so that you know, you’ll be amazed at how much easier QuickBooks will make your life. QuickBooks is a really cool program.

Part III: Stuff You Do from Time to Time

Part III talks about the kinds of things that you should do at the end of the week, the end of the month, or the end of the year. This part explains, for example, how you print checks, explore QuickBooks online resources, do payroll, and create a business budget.

While I’m on the subject, I also want to categorically deny that Part III con¬tains any secret messages that you can decipher by reading backward. Yllaer.

Part IV: Housekeeping Chores

Part IV talks about some of the maintenance that you need (or someone needs) to perform to keep your accounting system shipshape: account reconciliations, financial report generation, job costing mechanics, file management — and oh yes, fixed assets accounting.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Gravity isn’t just a good idea; it’s a law. By tradition, the same is true for this part of a For Dummies book. The Part of Tens provides a collection of lists: ten things you should do if you own a busi¬ness, ten things to do when you next visit Acapulco — oops, sorry about that last one. Wrong book.

Also by tradition, these ten-item lists don’t need to have exactly ten items. You know the concept of a baker’s dozen, right? You order a dozen dough¬nuts but get 13 for the same price. Well, For Dummies ten-item lists have roughly ten items. (If the Dummies Man — the bug-eyed, paleface guy suffer¬ing from triangle-shaped-head syndrome who appears on the cover of this book and on icons throughout these pages — were running the bakery, a 10-doughnut order might mean that you get anywhere from 8-13 doughnuts.) Do you believe that I’m an accountant? So exacting that it’s scary.

Part VI: Appendixes

An unwritten rule says that computer books have appendixes, so I include three. Appendix A tells you how to install QuickBooks in ten easy steps. Appendix B explains small business accounting, provides a short biography of an Italian monk, and explains double-entry bookkeeping. Appendix C describes how to set up QuickBooks for use by multiple users — and for mul¬tiple users on a network. Yikes.
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