QuickBooks 2018 All-in-One For Dummies

QuickBooks makes it easier for accountants to work with client data files. Consider this scenario: You have a client who needs help finishing the year’s accounting period. You have two choices. First, you can drive over to his shop, probably getting stuck in traffic along the way, and find yourself wondering whether you can bill the client $150 for your travel time.

If more than one person will be using QuickBooks, you want to set up additional users. To add users in QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, follow these steps: Choose the Company → Users → Set Up Users and Roles command. QuickBooks displays the User and Roles dialog box. This dialog box identifies any users for whom QuickBooks access has been set up and the roles QuickBooks can fill when using QuickBooks.

You aren’t limited to using just one password to control access to your QuickBooks data file. You can set up several passwords for the QuickBooks data file. What’s really neat about this is that you can tell QuickBooks to allow certain users and passwords to do only certain things. This sounds complicated, but it’s really not.

You can modify the rights that you assign to a user. To do this in QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, choose the Company --> Users --> Set Up Users and Roles command to display the Users and Roles dialog box. The Users and Roles dialog box.To change a user’s rights after reviewing them, select the user and click the Edit button.

You can modify the rights that you assign to a user in QuickBooks Pro or Premier. To do this, choose Company → Set Up Users and Passwords → Set Up Users to display the User List dialog box (not shown).To look at the rights that a particular user has, select the user in the list and then click the View User button.

Your client can also send a copy of the QuickBooks accountant’s copy electronically by using Intuit’s file transfer service. To do this, the client chooses File → Send Company File→Accountant’s Copy → Client Activities→ Send to Accountant. QuickBooks provides onscreen instructions for sending, or uploading, the accountant’s copy to the Intuit server, including the steps for adding a password to secure the uploaded file.

Sometimes, you need only a single computer and a single copy of QuickBooks, even though you have several employees using QuickBooks. If a small business has only an administrative assistant and the owner accessing a QuickBooks data file, for example, one copy of QuickBooks running on a single personal computer may be all that’s required.

After you’ve used an accountant’s copy to correct transactions or to enter new transactions, you export the changes so that they can later be imported into the client’s data file. To do this, choose the File → Send Company File→ Accountant’s Copy→ View/Export Changes for Client command. QuickBooks first displays a window that lists the changes you made to the accountant’s copy (not shown).

In QuickBooks 2018, your client imports the changes that you’ve made in the accountant’s copy of the data file into her working copy of the data file. To do this, the client chooses the File → Send Company File→Accountant’s Copy→ Client Activities→Import Accountant’s Changes command.QuickBooks displays the Import Accountant’s Changes dialog box, as shown.

You probably already have a budget created, but you need to record it in QuickBooks 2018. To create a new budget in QuickBooks 2018, follow these steps: Choose the Company→Planning and Budgeting→ Set Up Budgets command. This opens the Create New Budget dialog box, shown here, which you use to create a new budget.

Activity-based costing (ABC for short) may be the best new accounting idea in the past three decades. The approach is actually really straightforward if you’ve already been using QuickBooks. In short, all you do to implement a simple ABC system in QuickBooks is what you’re doing right now. In other words, just keep on tracking your operating expenses by using a good, decent chart of accounts.

If you decide to allow multiple users access to the QuickBooks data file, you’ll appreciate the QuickBooks Audit Trail feature, which keeps a record of who makes what changes in the QuickBooks data file. This feature is always on, and you can utilize it to determine whether information in the file has changed and the user who made the change.

Activity-based costing (ABC) in QuickBooks 2018 requires the use of classes. When you record an expense, you also identify the class into which the expense falls. Using classes that correspond to your activities — well, you can see that’s all it takes, right?After you turn on Class Tracking, using classes is really straightforward.

QuickBooks makes it easy for you — an accountant — to record journal entries. If you’ve spent any time working with QuickBooks, you may know that most of the journal entries that get recorded in the QuickBooks data file are recorded automatically. If somebody writes a check, for example, QuickBooks records the journal entry for that.

Just so you know, in large companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, two or three people spend much of or even all of their year working with the budgeted data. To edit an existing budget in QuickBooks 2018, follow these steps: Choose the Company → Planning & Budgeting →Set Up Budgets command. QuickBooks displays the Set Up Budgets window — the same one shown here.

Accounting data is often confidential information. Your QuickBooks data shows how much money you have in the bank, what you owe creditors, and how much (or how little!) profit your firm produces. Because this information is private, your first concern in administering a QuickBooks accounting system is keeping your data confidential.

QuickBooks 2018 offers control techniques that a business owner or business manager can use to minimize unintentional errors and minimize the opportunity for theft that occur when multiple users have access. Here are some great ideas: Regularly compare physical inventory counts with inventory accounting records.

After you record your budget in QuickBooks, you can compare your actual financial results with budgeted amounts by choosing commands from the Budgets & Forecasts submenu that QuickBooks displays. When you choose the Reports → Budgets & Forecasts command, QuickBooks provides several budgeting reports, described in the following list: Budget Overview: This report summarizes your budgeted amounts.

If you choose the Reports→Process Multiple Reports command, QuickBooks displays the Process Multiple Reports dialog box, shown here. This dialog box enables you to request a bunch of previously memorized or commented on reports at one time. The Process Multiple Reports dialog box.To use the Process Multiple Reports dialog box, first select a report group from the drop-down list.

QuickBooks provides more than 100 financial statements and accounting reports. You get to these reports by opening the Reports menu. The Reports menu arranges reports in roughly a dozen categories, including Company & Financial, Customers & Receivables, Sales, Jobs, and Time & Mileage.To produce just about any of the reports available through the Reports menu, you first select the Report category.

As noted previously, you need three items of data to perform profit-volume-cost analysis: sales revenue, gross margin percentage, and fixed cost. Typically, these items of data aren’t difficult to find if you’ve been using QuickBooks. Nevertheless, this data doesn’t map perfectly to line items that appear in a QuickBooks income statement.

The Accountant & Taxes menu appears when you choose the Reports → Accountant & Taxes command. Hidden on this submenu are nearly 20 commands and reports that are particularly interesting and useful to accountants. The following list identifies these reports: Adjusted Trial Balance: The Adjusted Trial Balance menu command produces, of course, a Trial Balance report as of a particular date.

The Client Data Review command is available in the Accountant Edition versions of QuickBooks 2018 Premier and QuickBooks 2018 Enterprise Solutions.Choose the Accountant → Client Data Review →Client Data Review command to display the Client Data Review – Start Review dialog box (see the figure). It starts you on a multiple-step process that walks you through the cleanup of a client’s QuickBooks data file, including utilities for finding and fixing unapplied customer and vendor payments and credits (a bane of bookkeepers everywhere), for performing wholesale reclassifications of transactions (useful for undoing wholesale errors), for cleaning up undeposited funds accounts and bad payroll liability account balances (common problems), and for writing off uncollectible invoices.

The Report window in QuickBooks 2018 provides five boxes: Dates, From, To, Columns, and Sort By. These boxes also enable you to control the information shown in the Report window and the appearance of the information. Dates, From, and To window boxes The Dates, From, and To boxes, for example, let you tell QuickBooks what reporting interval you want to show in the report.

The Display tab of the Modify Report dialog box in QuickBooks 2018 lets you control the report interval date, the report basis, the columns, and some other formatting.The Report Date Range boxes — Dates, From, and To — do the same thing as the Dates, From, and To boxes in the Report window. These boxes let you control the reporting interval or accounting period.

The Filters tab in QuickBooks 2018 is probably the most interesting and useful tab provided by the Modify Report dialog box. The Filters tab enables you to set up filters that you can use to specify what information gets summarized in the report. To use the Filters tab, shown here, you first select the field on which you want to base a filter from the Filter list box.

The Fonts & Numbers tab in QuickBooks 2018, shown here, lets you change the font for selected pieces of report information. Use the Change Font For list box to select the bit of report information that you want to change. The Fonts & Numbers tab of the Modify Report dialog box.After this selection, click the Change Font button to display a dialog box like the one shown in the following figure.

The QuickBooks 2018 Header/Footer tab, shown here, controls what header and footer information appears on your report. You use the Show Header Information check boxes to control the report header. If you want your company name to appear at the top of the report, for example, select the Company Name check box. And if you want to change the company name that appears at the top of the report, edit the contents of the Company Name text box.

Regardless of whether the client manually transmits an accountant’s copy, emails an accountant’s copy, or sends an accountant’s copy via the Intuit file transfer service, you use the accountant’s copy by choosing the File→ Send Company File →Accountant’s Copy → Open & Convert Transfer File command. When you choose this command, QuickBooks displays a series of message boxes explaining how you work with the accountant’s copy.

The Report window typically provides ten buttons: Customize Report, Comment on Report, Share Template, Memorize, Print, E-mail, Excel, Hide Header, Collapse, and Refresh. You can find out what these command buttons do by experimentation. If you don’t have time for that, read the following sections. Customize Report button The Customize Report button displays the Modify Report dialog box.