Free QuickBooks Tutorial

Learning quickbooks before you jump in and get bogged down is one of the first steps in setting up an effective small business accounting system.

However, before you install or open QuickBooks, there are a few things you will need to do first:

QuickBooks Tutorial Step 1: Decide on a start date

QuickBooks has two starting dates:

• The “conversion” date is the date you start entering new transactions in QuickBooks.
• The “start” date is the date QuickBooks begins tracking transactions in order to produce reports. That date is the first day of your fiscal year.

QuickBooks tracks transactions form the first day of your fiscal year to the last. So you must enter historical transaction information into QuickBooks to provide accurate balances for your accounts.

You do not have to enter each individual transaction your business has incurred since the first of the year; instead, you can combine transactions and enter the total.

For example, say your conversion date is May 1st. You could enter the total of your income up to that date as one transaction and then enter all of your electric bills as one single transaction and so on.

Tips:

• If your conversion date is early in the year, you might want to consider entering each single transaction incurred from the first of the year until your go-live date, if you start using QuickBooks in the middle, I would use the combined historical method mentioned above, and if it is toward the end of your fiscal year I would consider waiting until the first of the next year.

• Your conversion date must always be on the first day of a period: the year, the quarter, or the month.

• You do not have to enter your historical transactions before you can start using QuickBooks. You can enter them later, just be careful to date them correctly. QuickBooks uses the current date automatically, so you will have to remember to manually change the date for each transaction.

Additional Tutorials on How to Use QuickBooks:

• QuickBooks-Tutorial 2: Preparing a Trial Balance
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 3: Installing QuickBooks and Creating a Co File
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 4: Setting up a Chart of Accounts
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 5: Class Tracking
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 6; Setting Up an Item List
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 7; Setting Up a Customer List
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 8: Record Sales in a Sales Receipt
• QuickBooks-Tutorial 9: Record Expenses in QuickBooks

• Setting up QuickBooks for Web Site Owners
• Recording Online Sales

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