quickbooks 2012 for dummies

Stephen L. Nelson, MBA, CPA Author of Quicken For Dummies Learn to: • Organize financial information for your business • Pay bills and process invoices and pa yroll • Build a budget, manage inventory, and t rack expenses • Prepare taxes and generate f inancial reports QuickBooks ® 2012 Making Everything Easier! ™ Open the book and find: • Steps to setting up and succeeding with QuickBooks • How to compute employee wages and payroll deductions • Ways to customize invoices and memos • What you need to estimate jobs and track costs • How to keep an eye on inventory • Tips for building the perfect budget • What to do before tax time • Special guidelines business owners should never forget Stephen L. Nelson, MBA, CPA, provides accounting, business advisory, tax planning, and tax preparation services to small businesses. He belongs to the American Institute of CPAs and holds an MBA in Finance and a Master’s in Taxation. His 100-plus books have sold more than four million copies. $24.99 US / $29.99 CN / £17.99 UK ISBN 978-1-118-09120-3 Computers/Financial Applications Go to Dummies.com ® for videos, step-by-step examples, how-to articles, or to shop! Manage your business finances the easy way with QuickBooks Get your small business rolling with great ideas, exceptional organization skills, unique products or services — and a trusted, accessible, accounting system like QuickBooks. QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies shows you how to use this popular business accounting program to clearly understand your finances and run your business with ease. • Start here — discover what you need to do to be ready for QuickBooks, set up the software, reel in the dough, and pay the bills • Get it together — learn to enter data, create professional-looking i nvoices, and record and print sales receipts • Financial housekeeping — estimate jobs, check inventory, and ev aluate fixed assets • Watch that dough — effectively keep track of your checkbook, c redit card accounts, inventory, payroll, and budgets • Narrow it down — get a company snapshot telling you who needs to g et paid, who owes money, and what needs to be done • Monitoring made easy — create financial reports and track ev ery dollar coming in and going out • Fear tax time no more — organize your data and simplify ta x preparation • Get on-track, online — securely download bank and credit card t ransactions directly into QuickBooks QuickBooks ® 2012 Nelson Start with FREE Cheat Sheets Cheat Sheets include • Checklists • Charts • Common Instructions • And Other Good Stuff! 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Get More and Do More at Dummies.com ® To access the Cheat Sheet created specifically for this book, go to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/quickbooks2012 Mobile Apps There’s a Dummies App for This and That With more than 200 million books in print and over 1,600 unique titles, Dummies is a global leader in how-to information. Now you can get the same great Dummies information in an App. With topics such as Wine, Spanish, Digital Photography, Certification, and more, you’ll have instant access to the topics you need to know in a format you can trust. To get information on all our Dummies apps, visit the following: www.Dummies.com/go/mobile from your computer. www.Dummies.com/go/iphone/apps from your phone. QuickBooks ® 2012 FOR DUMmIES ‰ [...]... Solutions and QuickBooks Premier from QuickBooks Simple Start and QuickBooks Pro are all things that only accountants care about: remote access to QuickBooks and your QuickBooks data, reversal of general entries, extra security for general ledger closings, and so on So I don’t talk much about those things 2 QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies The bottom line? Yes, there are several flavors of QuickBooks, but... this book or with QuickBooks Quite a lot, actually The whole purpose of this book is to make it easier for you to run or work in a small business by using QuickBooks About QuickBooks Let me start off with a minor but useful point: QuickBooks comes in several different flavors, including QuickBooks Basic, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Premier Accountants Edition, and QuickBooks Enterprise... these books on your flavor of Windows: Windows XP For Dummies, 2nd Edition, Windows Vista For Dummies, or Windows 7 For Dummies, all by Andy Rathbone How This Book Is Organized This book is divided into six, 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... Getting Ready for the QuickBooks Setup 19 The big decision 20 The trial balance of the century 21 The mother of all scavenger hunts 24 Stepping through the QuickBooks Setup 25 Starting QuickBooks 25 Using the Express Setup 27 The Rest of the Story 34 Should You Get Your Accountant’s Help? 34 xii QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies Chapter... took pictures of the You have a PC QuickBooks windows and dialog boxes while using Windows 7, in case you’re interested.) ✓ bit about how to work with your computer You know a little ✓ buy a copy of QuickBooks for each computer on You have or will which you want to run the program This book works for QuickBooks 2012, although in a pinch, you can probably also use it for QuickBooks 2011 or 2013 (I have... describing how you use QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, I also tell you how to use the other flavors of QuickBooks What’s more, for the readers of this book, there’s no discernible difference between QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Pro You aren’t reading this book to prepare for the CPA exam, right? Right The extra whistles and bells that differentiate QuickBooks Enterprise... 156 Recording items that you pay for upfront 157 Recording items that don’t come with a bill 157 Paying for items when you get the bill 159 Recording items and paying the bill all at once 161 When You Sell Stuff 161 xiii xiv QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies How Purchase Orders Work 162 Customizing a purchase order form 162 Filling out a purchase order... also use it for QuickBooks 2011 or 2013 (I have to say, however, that if you have QuickBooks 2011, you may instead want to return this book and trade it in for QuickBooks 2011 For Dummies by yours truly.) By the way, if you haven’t already installed QuickBooks and need help, jump to Appendix A, which tells you how to install QuickBooks in ten easy steps And, if you’re just starting out with Microsoft Windows,... Solutions of QuickBooks, which is nearly identical in appearance and operation to QuickBooks Premier and QuickBooks Premier Accountants Edition Does this mean that I somehow leave you adrift if you have one of the other flavors? No way I wouldn’t do that to you QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions (as well as the two Premier flavors of QuickBooks) is a superset of QuickBooks Simple Start and QuickBooks Pro... the ease of use of QuickBooks and the cheap price that Intuit charges for QuickBooks But oddly enough, the ubiquity of QuickBooks becomes its own benefit, too For example, you’ll find it very easy to find a bookkeeper who knows QuickBooks And if you can’t, you can hire someone who doesn’t know QuickBooks and then send them to a QuickBooks class at the local community college (because that class will . phone. QuickBooks ® 2012 FOR DUMmIES ‰