Читать книгу QuickBooks 2021 For Dummies - Nelson Stephen L., Stephen L. Nelson - Страница 20

Now let me share another little tip about getting going with QuickBooks. At the point where you install the QuickBooks software and start the program, you’ll be in shock about the number of commands, whistles, bells, and buttons that the QuickBooks window provides. But you know what? You can’t focus on the QuickBooks features.

Your job is simply to figure out how to record a handful — probably a small handful — of transactions with QuickBooks. Therefore, what you want to do is focus on the transactions that need to be recorded for you to keep your books.

Suppose that you’re a one-person consulting business. In that case, you may need to figure out how to record only the following three transactions:

 Invoices

 Payments from customers (because you invoiced them)

 Payments to vendors (because they sent you bills)

So all you need to do is discover how to record invoices (see Chapter 4), record customer payments (see Chapter 5), and record checks (see Chapter 6). You don’t need to worry about much else except maybe how to print reports, but that’s easy. (See Chapter 15 for the click-by-click.)

“Oh, Steve,” you’re saying, “you just intentionally picked an easy business. I’m a retailer with a much more complicated situation.”

Okay, well, you’re right that I picked an easy business for my first example, but I stand by the same advice for retailers. If you’re a retailer, you probably need to figure out how to record only four transactions:

 Sales receipts

 Bills from your suppliers

 Payments to your vendors

 Employee payroll checks

In this example, then, all you need to do is find out how to record sales receipts — probably a separate sales receipt for each bank deposit you make (see Chapter 5) — how to record bills from vendors, how to record checks to pay your bills (see Chapter 6), and how to handle employee payroll (see Chapter 11).

I don’t want to be cranky or careless here, but one truly good trick for getting up to speed with QuickBooks is to focus on the transactions that you need to record. If you identify those transactions and then figure out how to record them, you’ve done the hard part. Really.