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Stephen L. Nelson
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Published:
October 17, 2016

QuickBooks 2017 For Dummies

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Overview

The perennial bestseller—updated for the latest release of QuickBooks

If you're like most people involved with a small business, accounting isn't necessarily your strong suit, and certainly isn't the reason you got involved with your venture. Luckily, this bestselling guide shows you just how easy it is to use QuickBooks to keep your ducks in a row—so you can spend less time worrying about finances and more time concentrating on other aspects of your growing business.

With easy-to-follow guidance and plain-English explanations that cut through confusing financial jargon, QuickBooks 2017 For Dummies assumes no prior knowledge of the software and gets you started at the very beginning. In

no time, you'll discover how to install the software and configure QuickBooks for your business needs, set up payroll reminders, download bank and credit card transactions, pay bills online, keep track of your checkbook and credit cards, and so much more.

  • Organize all of your business finances in one place
  • Create invoices and credit memos, record sales receipts, and pay the bills
  • Track inventory, calculate job costs, and monitor your business reports
  • Make tax time easier

Written by a CPA who knows QuickBooks and understands your unique business needs, this is your go-to guide for getting past the paperwork and putting the program to work for you.

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About The Author

Stephen L. Nelson, MBA, CPA, MS in Taxation, provides accounting, business advisory, tax planning, and tax preparation services for small businesses such as manufacturers, retailers, service firms, and start-up technology companies. He has written more than 100 books, which have sold more than five million copies.

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Some versions of QuickBooks present you with a handful of additional Reports menu commands. These additional commands are especially numerous in the Enterprise Solutions version of QuickBooks. Take a look at some of these commands: Custom Reports: Displays commands that you can use to create reports from scratch, following your specific instructions.
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QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise Solutions include a cool tool for accounting for the manufacture of items. Suppose that Pine Lake Porcelain — an example business — mostly just buys and resells coffee mugs and other porcelain doodads.But also suppose that once a year, Pine Lake Porcelain assembles a romantic collection of red coffee mugs into a boxed St.
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If you charge a customer for actual costs and hours, you need to track the costs and time in QuickBooks 2017 when you incur the charges for them. You assign the cost to the job by entering the customer and job information in the Customer:Job column that’s shown in the window used to record a particular cost or time charge.
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Perhaps you record a credit card charge in QuickBooks 2017 and then realize that you recorded it incorrectly. Or perhaps you shouldn’t have recorded it at all because you didn’t pay for the business lunch. (Someone else paid for it after one of those friendly arguments over who should pay the bill. You know the type of argument: “No, I insist.
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The QuickReport is one of the best kinds of reports in QuickBooks 2017. You can generate a QuickReport from a list, from invoices and bills with names of people or items on them, and from account registers. QuickReports are especially useful when you’re studying a list and see something that momentarily baffles you.
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QuickBooks 2017 does a pretty good job of tracking inventory, but you’re still going to have to regularly take a complete physical inventory of what you have in stock. Occasionally, you’re going to have to go over everything and count it by hand. Sorry. You just can’t avoid that chore. QuickBooks can produce a handy physical inventory worksheet that you and your minions can use to count inventory.
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In QuickBooks 2017, you can enter bills directly in the Accounts Payable register. This method is the fastest, but it makes tracking expenses and items more difficult.If you want to enter bills directly in the Accounts Payable register, follow these steps: Choose Lists → Chart of Accounts or click the Chart of Accounts icon on the home page.
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When a bill comes in, the first thing to do is record it in QuickBooks 2017. You can record bills through the Enter Bills window or the Accounts Payable register. If you plan to track bills by expense and item, you need to use the Enter Bills window.To record a bill through the Enter Bills window, follow these steps: Choose Vendors → Enter Bills.
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To record loan payments in QuickBooks 2017, you need to split each payment between two accounts: the interest expense account and the loan payable account.Suppose that you make $75 monthly payments on a $5,000 loan. Also suppose that the lender charges 1 percent interest each month. The following journal entry records the first month’s loan payment: Debit Credit Explanation Interest expense $50 Calculated as 1% of $5,000 Loan payable $25 The amount left over and applied to principal Cash $75 The total payment amount The next month, of course, the loan balance is slightly less (because you made a $25 dent in the loan principal, as shown in the preceding loan payment journal entry).
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To revise an estimate in QuickBooks 2017, display the Create Estimates window. Then click the Previous button until you see the estimate. Make your changes, and QuickBooks recalculates all the totals. Smile. Imagine doing this task by hand — the recalculations, the looking up of prices, the retyping, the inordinate amount of wasted time.
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Doing all your banking electronically can be a little unsettling when you’re starting out with QuickBooks 2017. What if you have a question, for example? All you do is send an email to the bank, asking the people there whatever question you’d normally ask in a telephone call or at the drive-through window. To do so, follow these steps: Choose Banking → Bank Feeds → Create Online Banking Message.
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To turn on the job costing or estimating feature in QuickBooks 2017, choose Edit → Preferences. Click the Jobs & Estimates icon on the left; click the Company Preferences tab; and then use the Do You Create Estimates? and Do You Do Progress Invoicing? radio buttons to tell QuickBooks whether, in fact, you want to do these things.
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QuickBooks 2017 doesn’t require you to or even let you “close” months and years, the way old manual accounting systems did. (When you “closed” an old accounting period, you actually zeroed-out the revenue and expense accounts and transferred the net amount to the owner’s equity accounts.)QuickBooks does let you use a closing date and password, however.
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When you can’t remember the information that you need to find a particular entry or transaction in QuickBooks 2017, you can search for the information by using the Find dialog box.If you can’t recall when you entered the bill, choose Edit → Find to open the Find dialog box. Choose a filter (the category to search by).
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QuickBooks 2017 offers you a plethora of reports to choose from. You can do some neat things with the reports you create. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most valuable tricks: QuickZooming mysterious figures: If you don’t understand where a number in a report comes from, point to it with the mouse. As you point to numbers, QuickBooks changes the mouse pointer to a magnifying glass marked with a Z.
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QuickBooks 2017 makes easy work of tracking owner’s equity. Depending on the structure of your business, you will need to take a different approach. Keep reading for the scoop. Owner’s equity in a sole proprietorship Actually, tracking owner’s equity in a sole proprietorship is easy. You can use the single account that QuickBooks sets up for you, called Opening Bal Equity, to track what you’ve invested in the business.
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To ingratiate itself with you retailers, QuickBooks 2017 includes a special dialog box for paying sales tax. To use this dialog box, you must have sales tax items or a sales tax group already set up.To see how much sales tax you owe and to write checks to government agencies in one fell swoop, choose Vendors → Sales Tax → Pay Sales Tax to access the Pay Sales Tax dialog box.
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It would be great to provide detailed, state-specific help to you regarding state taxes and how it applies to QuickBooks 2017. Unfortunately, this would be about 150 pages long and cause you to go stark-raving mad.Sanity and laziness aside, you still need to deal with state payroll taxes. However, that you apply the same basic mechanics to state payroll taxes that you apply to federal payroll taxes.
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If you run a small business, you don’t need all the reports that QuickBooks 2017 offers, but many of these reports are extremely useful. Reports show you how healthy or unhealthy your business is, where your profits are, and where you’re wasting time and squandering resources.To make sense of what might otherwise become mass confusion, QuickBooks organizes all its reports in categories.
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QuickBooks 2017 has some near formulas you may not know about. Here’s something you may not know: The most expensive money that you can borrow is from vendors who offer cash or early-payment discounts that you don’t take. The first “most expensive money you can borrow” formula Perhaps your friendly office-supply store offers a 2 percent discount if you pay cash at the time of purchase instead of paying within the usual 30 days.
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If you start entering checks, deposits, and transfers in your registers in QuickBooks 2017, you soon find yourself with registers that contain hundreds, and even thousands, of transactions. You may need some help for dealing with (drum roll, please) the big register phenomenon. Moving through a big register You can use the Page Up and Page Down keys to move up and down through your register a screenful of transactions at a time.
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To track the depreciation of an asset that you’ve already purchased (and added to the Chart of Accounts), you need two new accounts in QuickBooks 2017: a Fixed Asset type of account called something like Accumulated Depreciation and an Expense type of account called something like Depreciation Expense. If you have a large number of assets, keeping track of the accumulated depreciation associated with specific assets is a good idea.
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You can use a simple approach to inventory accounting with QuickBooks 2017. Rather than keeping track of individual inventory items by using a perpetual inventory system — which simply means that you track each item when it moves into your business and out into a customer’s car or minivan — you can use a simple periodic system.
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If you tell QuickBooks 2017 that you need to do your accounting in multiple currencies — something you do in the Pro, Premier, and Enterprise Solutions editions by choosing Edit → Preferences, selecting Multiple Currencies, clicking the Company Preferences tab, and then clicking the Yes I Use More Than One Currency button — QuickBooks reconfigures its operation and appearance so you can work with more than one currency.
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QuickBooks 2017 includes a portable-files feature. A portable file is a smaller, condensed version of the QuickBooks data file. The portable file is small enough, in fact, that you can probably email it to your accountant, your sister in Portland, or me.To create a portable file, choose File → Create Copy. When QuickBooks displays the first Save Copy or Backup dialog box, select the Portable Company File option button, click Next, and then follow the onscreen instructions.
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