Fortunately, it’s quite easy. You simply dial up a QuickBooks Pro Advisor by zip code. There’s a good chance that there is a professional QuickBooks consultant near you.

You’ll see a list of consultants in your area. Read their information and the reviews their clients have given them. Pick a few that look good to you and give them a call. Find out their rates and, more importantly, their experience in doing first time set up for QuickBooks newbies. Ask them what their approach would be. Then make an appointment with one you feel comfortable with.

If you are looking for online training with live trainer interaction in an online seminar format, explore the online classes offered through AccountingUsers, Inc.

QuickBooks Items play an important role in your daily task of entering transactions into your QuickBooks company file.  You use Items when you create invoices, fill out checks, create purchase orders, buy new equipment, enter a bill from a vendor, and even pay your employees.

In addition to making data entry easier, items handle ALL of the behind-the-scenes accounting functions for you when you use them, and that’s really important if you run any type of business that requires job costing.  When you create an item, you link it to accounts; when you use the item on a QuickBooks form, it posts an entry to that account and another entry to the appropriate accounts receivable, accounts payable, checking, fixed asset, liability, cost of goods sold account, or any other expense account.

You’ll find that items are very easy to set up, but you may be confused about what they are used for. After all, the term “item” is pretty generic.  For example, as a contractor your item list could hold your Cost Codes, a simple list of labor and materials that you use on a job, or a list of things that you keep in inventory and sell to your customers.

You really should spend some time deciding how you can make Items work for you before you start setting them up and using them.  Below are some tips for creating your QuickBooks Item List:

• Use a current list of services and products
• Consider how much detail you want or need to display on your Estimates, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, and Invoices
• Consider how much detail you want or need to track for Job Costing purposes
• Make sure that each of your items are set up to track both income and expenses

QuickBooks allows you to create several different types of items to help you create Purchase Orders, Estimates, Sales Orders and Invoices for your customers and fill out bills and checks to record the money you spend in order to get the job done.  Choose from the following types of Items:

• Service – used for tracking specialized labor, consulting hours, and perhaps professional fees that you charge for or purchase from others
• Inventory Part – used for tracking goods or materials that you purchase, track as inventory and then resell to your customers
• Inventory Assembly – (available in Premier and Enterprise versions only) used for assembled goods you build or purchase, track as inventory, and resell
• Non-inventory Part - used for tracking goods and/or materials that you purchase for a specific job
• Other Charge – used for tracking miscellaneous labor, materials, delivery charges, setup fees, service charges, recording bounced checks, late fees, opening balances, reimbursable expenses, retainers/deposits, retainage, shipping and handling fees and more
• Subtotal – used to create a total of all items above it on an Invoice, useful for applying a percentage discount or to deduct retainage
• Group – used to associate individual items that often appear together on Estimates, Invoices, Purchase Orders, etc.  Build groups so that all of the items that are in the group can be added to the form at the same time
• Discount – used to subtract a percentage or a fixed amount from a total or a subtotal.  Do not use this item type for an early payment discount
• Payment – used to record a job deposit  from a customer
• Sales Tax Item – used to calculate a single sales tax rate that you pay to a single tax agency
• Sales Tax Group - used to calculate and individually track two or more sales tax items that apply to the same sale – for example, if you have to collect a local, a county and a state sales tax, each of these items would be set up as individual Sales Tax Items and then combine them into a group

Keep in mind that you may not want to create items for 2 x 8’s or 2” sheetrock screws.  If you create that type of detail, the person who enters the bills from the lumber yard or the hardware store will also have to break out all of the detail as well.  For example, if your company does sheetrock – do you need an item for each edge type, thickness, and type of sheetrock you install?  This then becomes a very time-consuming process that has a high margin for data entry errors.  To streamline data entry could you perhaps get away with items just 7 items – 1 item for each type of sheetrock – and add the edge type and thickness to a general description?

Is your QuickBooks Item List doing its job for your company?  Maybe it’s time for a review!

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About the Author:
Nancy Smyth has supported Intuit products and end users since 1986, with her primary focus being commercial/government construction contractors. She has been a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor since 1999; and as President of Sunburst Software Solutions, Inc., she is a key player in the development of several QuickBooks Add-Ons for the construction industry. She is also the author of the QuickBooks for Contractors blog.

Why? Because it’s by far the smallest kind of backup of your data that you can make. QuickBooks might take a 1GB Enterprise QBW file (native format company data file) and create a portable copy that is perhaps 150MB. Much faster to send electronically!

Some people worry about that, though. More than one person has asked me “Are you getting all our information if we send that kind of file?”

The answer is yes. The portable copy contains all your raw accounting information.

How can it be so small, then? It’s because the portable copy doesn’t have any internal indexing in it. The indexes are recreated when you restore a portable copy, and the file size of the QBW returns to ‘normal’. That is why restoring a portable copy takes a long time relative to a regular QBB backup; QuickBooks has to reindex the file.

Portable copies are a great format to send files electronically, or to back up to a USB drive or online drive that has limited space.

Sometimes QuickBooks files will get corrupted in such a way that a portable copy cannot be created — you’ll get an error when trying to create one. Otherwise, it’s a reliable method of backing up your QuickBooks file.

Right or wrong, QuickBooks keeps your accounting data around more or less permanently. You can run the QuickBooks archive/condense/clean up command (the naming of it differs across versions) but that has limited results. You can have your file supercondensed. But otherwise, your transaction history sticks around pretty much forever.

That’s a good thing for running historical reports whenever you want.

The potential for problems, however, comes through the ability to add, change, or delete entries made in a prior year — after you have already filed your company’s taxes. Definitely a no-no.

So how can you avoid that? It’s easy. Use the Set Closing Date and Password command in QuickBooks. That will more or less lock down your prior years’ information so that it cannot be altered without your controlled permission.

With your company file open in QuickBooks, click Edit / Preferences. Select the Accounting preference in the left pane. Then click the Company Preferences tab. You’ll see this:

Click the button at the bottom called Set Date/Password. Here’s what you’ll see:

This screen represents powerful accounting control for you.

At the Closing Date prompt, enter the date at which you want to restrict any changes (e.g. December 31 of the previous year).

Enter a password that is unique for this purpose (don’t recycle a user’s password here). Reason? If anyone tries to make a change to a transaction in a “closed” year, they won’t be able to do so without knowing this special password.

If you don’t create a password here, anyone who tries to enter or change a transaction prior to the closing date will get a warning, but will still be able to make the entry. You are leaving the door open to all kinds of problems if you don’t create a password here.

There is a checkbox to exclude sales orders, estimates, and purchase orders from the closing date limitation. Why? Well, those kinds of entries aren’t actually accounting transactions — they don’t post to your general ledger or subledger account balances, so changing them doesn’t change your financial reports. You may or may not want to check the box, depending on your accounting control policies and how you handle those kinds of pre-transactions in your business.

Close the books in QuickBooks? Not really. But that doesn’t mean you can’t control the the books.

I remember as a kid growing up in Houston going to the Baskin Robbins store on Memorial Drive. 31 flavors! Mint Chocolate Chip or Rocky Road…hmmmm…

QuickBooks users make choices too.

The hot choice these days, at least from Intuit’s point of view, is QuickBooks Online. I just read an article interview with Intuit’s CFO that said that QuickBooks Online is growing at 30% per year and accounts for two-thirds of sales.

That edition’s advantages? There are several. You never have to worry about updating your software or data. You don’t have to worry about local network IT, as far as QuickBooks is concerned. Your team can access the books from any office, anywhere.

The most popular choice in the desktop editions? QuickBooks Pro. It has all the general accounting functionality that most small businesses need, and has a ton of optional add-in offerings that extend its usefulness even further. It’s affordable ($154.96 on Amazon as of today). Main drawback? As of the 2011 version, you can only have three licenses on a network. That means only three simultaneous users.

Next flavor? Premier edition. This actually comes in a number of sub-flavors according to the type of business you have: Contractors, NonProfit, Manufacturing and Wholesale, Professional Services, Retail and Accountant versions. The Contractors and Manufacturers versions are especially popular. You can have up to five licenses on a network with the Premier edition, and you can buy 3-bundle licenses.

The heaviest lifting is done by the Enterprise edition. There are subflavors here as well that are industry-specific. Intuit has tuned this edition to perform under heavy user loads. I spoke with a user yesterday who had 25 Enterprise users on their network. (And that sometimes can bog down if the data file is very large. That’s why we supercondense a lot of large files for Enterprise users these days.)

Enterprise also is the only QuickBooks edition that has advanced inventory functions. It is the only edition except for 2012 Premier Accountants edition that can have more than one company open at a time. But mostly, it’s about IT performance for businesses with high transaction volume or heavy-duty inventory.

The various editions of QuickBooks mix and mingle within limits. You can upgrade your QuickBooks file to a higher edition whenever you want. That is, a Pro file will convert to Premier no problem. Either of these will convert to Enterprise. Any of those will convert to QuickBooks Online.

There is a 140MB size limit for converting from any of the desktop editions to QuickBooks Online, however. We often see files from people whose file size exceeds that, and we remove old years’ data to get the file small enough to convert to QuickBooks Online. (This is another application of our supercondense service.)

Data can be downgraded from Enterprise to Pro or Premier, but only with special conversion services.

Within the same edition, older version company files will automatically upgrade to newer versions whenever you open the company in the newer version. The opposite is not true, however: Newer version data cannot be converted to older versions (QuickBooks Pro 2011 cannot be converted to QuickBooks Pro 2010, for example).

You’ve also got the Mac version of QuickBooks. It kind of lives alone in the QuickBooks universe.

Anyway, you don’t have 31 flavors to pick from, but you do have several.

1. 13 Steps to Implementing Job Costing in QuickBooks for Contractors

Job costing is an important function for every business that has employees, sells goods, or provides services to customers. Job costing is especially important for contractors, because you need to know if you are making money on the jobs that you have been awarded…

2. How to Open QuickBooks When It Won’t Open

Occasionally, QuickBooks users find themselves in a Catch-22: They need to restore a backup in QuickBooks, but they can’t get QuickBooks itself to open.

This can happen if your company file got damaged during your last session in the program. Perhaps the power went off and your computer turned off without closing out QuickBooks first, or there was a network hiccup, or some other kind of hardware problem…

3. How to Transfer QuickBooks from One Computer to Another

Did you get yourself a shiny new computer on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Or maybe you just need to get some year-end bookkeeping done on your laptop over the holidays?

If you need to get QuickBooks from one computer to another, it’s not a big deal. Here’s what you do…

4. My QuickBooks File Is HUGE! What Can I Do?

I’ve talked to a lot of QuickBooks users who have told me their QuickBooks file is too big.

According to several Pro and Premier end users, Intuit support told them that you should upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise Edition if your company file size exceeds 100MB.

Whoa, hold on pardner…

5. What to Do When QuickBooks Is (Not Responding)

Has this happened to you? I’m guessing you’ve seen it before: You’re trying to update your company, or make a backup, or verify your company, or run a big report.

QuickBooks gets off to a good start, but then seems to stall. You make a couple of clicks and Windows pipes up: “(Not Responding)”. Oh, great…

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Well, that’s the best from 2011. Here’s hoping that 2012 is a great year for you and that QuickBooks is your stalwart helper in the back office.

One of many pine trees broken off by high winds

In my neighborhood, I counted 8 broken-off ponderosa pines as I drove down the main road the next day.

There was one tree with a five foot diameter trunk, broken completely off. That tree had to have been hundreds of years old.

They couldn’t bend enough. So they broke.

Most businesses these days feel the economic gales pushing against their trunks.

Bend, don’t break.

Do you need a cash infusion to give more flexibility until cash is self-sustaining through your operations?

Do you need to restructure or renegotiate some debt so the wind doesn’t push as hard?

Do you need to find a consulting CFO to review your books to see if there are costs or expenses that are disproportionately high for your kind of business?

Do you need to change your approach to customer terms and collections so that the cash comes in quicker?

Do you need to prune off departments/locations/branches that cause stress to the whole organization?

We’ve had to do that. We’ve gotten out of some business areas that were not at our core and that were not very profitable or strategic. That helped.

Bend, don’t break. And here’s to to the hope that the wind won’t blow as hard in 2012.

What if it gets so big that performance starts to suffer? Or you start to experience errors or intermittent problems in the software?

Two different QuickBooks users recently had that experience, and sent their files in to us to be supercondensed.

What is supercondensing? It is a process where we remove all closed transactions from a file prior to a cut off date of your choosing. We leave all the transactions ahead of the cut off date, and we leave open or pending transactions regardless of their date.

The end result is a file that is quite small and fast compared to the original.

We often schedule these on weekends, so that there is no downtime on the client’s side.

Here is what a couple of our clients said about their experience in having us condense their file this way (quoted by permission):

“We are very pleased. We ended up with a smaller file size than estimated. Very convenient for a business b/c I sent the file on Friday @ 5:00 pm and it was returned and reloaded Sunday afternoon. We were up and running on Monday w/o any problems.”
— Vicki Hilliard, Patio Supply

“AccountingUsers did exactly as they promised. We sent our file to them on a Friday and received our file back on Saturday afternoon. I downloaded the new file, installed it and was up and running Monday morning with absolutely no down time. Our Quickbooks is so much faster now. I wish I had used their service much sooner!” — Lynn Wrinkle, Blade Energy Partners

Weekend service for supercondensing is available for no extra charge.

1. Am I making money, or losing money? Assuming that you enter information into QuickBooks correctly, QuickBooks will generate reports for you that will very simply answer this question.

Run Profit and Loss reports (found in Reports / Company and Financial ) to see whether you are making more money than you are spending. (Hopefully your company is doing better on this than the U.S. government!)

The Profit and Loss Prev Year Comparison report is especially helpful. With it you can tell if you are making or losing money in greater amounts than last year. Why is that important? Well, it can help you decide if your business is going in the right direction, or if you need to make important changes.

I’ve read that most new businesses fail because they don’t know if they are making money or not. If you are using QuickBooks, you shouldn’t be in the dark about whether you’re profitable.

2. Do I have enough cash? Are my business operations generating enough cash to fund the business? Run the Statement of Cash Flows report to see. You can run the report for different date ranges to try to determine what the trend is.

3. Who owes me money? Of course, that’s what the Customer Center is about in QuickBooks. But if you want to get an instant look at the highlights, go to Company Snapshot, and look at the “Customers Who Owe Money” pane. (If that pane is not enabled in your Company Snapshot screen, you can click Add Content and select that screen to put it into your snapshot). By instantly seeing which customers are in arrears, you can get on the phone and work on collections.

4. Which parts of my business are profitable, and which are not? If you use classes in your QuickBooks data, you can track profitability in different ways. For example, you can track profitability by location, by department, by division, by market…

The Profit & Loss by Class report then becomes very interesting. That report will show a separate column for each of your classes — your business areas. You can then see and evaluate the profitability of each. Is one of your business areas unprofitable? What will you do about it? Is one of your business areas especially profitable? What can you do to maximize that?

If you want more help in deciphering these issues, make an appointment with your CPA and come to the meeting armed with these reports. He or she will be glad to help you understand your company’s financial big picture.

But first, a bit of background. As of now, QuickBooks Windows and Mac versions for 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009 are fully supported by Intuit. Prior versions are not. The 2008 version was “sunsetted” by Intuit in May of 2011. This is in accordance with their policy of supporting the current and prior two versions of QuickBooks (which in my opinion makes perfectly good sense, but that’s another subject).

From a user’s point of view, the sunset policy matters only if your software requires ongoing support by Intuit. But support means lots of different things in QuickBooks these days — not just payroll subscriptions, but online banking, credit card processing, online backups and, of course, telephone support.

If you don’t need any of that? You can keep using your old version just fine.

But what if you need to install and register your old version of QuickBooks on a new computer, and you don’t have your original install codes written down anywhere?
Intuit support won’t give them to you, because you are using an unsupported version.

In another blog post that describes how to move your QuickBooks installation from one computer to another, a user described how he was stymied. He had been using a 2007 version of QuickBooks and didn’t have his registration codes. So he couldn’t install the software on his new computer.

But…he figured it out! Since he still had access to his old computer, he found that he could pull his license number and product number from his existing installation and use that on his new computer. He gives the step by step instructions in his blog comment.

If you don’t have your original install CD, you’re still in business, because you can download old versions from Intuit’s website (at least as of today) from here.

It’s always possible, of course, that there will be a hitch in that registration process and the software will force you to call Intuit, in which case you’re out of luck. Likewise, you’re messed up if you don’t have your install codes written down AND you cannot access your original QuickBooks installation (if your hard drive totally failed, for example). But otherwise, you have a good chance of getting your old software up and running on new equipment.

That was one user’s experience, anyway.