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Trouble Shooting for Setting Up QuickBooks

Do you need trouble shooting for setting up QuickBooks? Is that you? Perhaps you have a mess. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “QuickBooks is not as easy as I thought.”

Accounting can be overwhelming because it is like a foreign language. There are certain things you have to learn, and if you don’t learn them, you will struggle.

That is why you need QuickBooks; it helps you with the accounting. It has learned all the rules of accounting and makes it easy for someone to jump in without an accounting background and take care of their own bookkeeping.

It is however, very important to do the set up correctly. Without a correct set up, you will have a mess to struggle through, and you might need someone like my Papa, Lee Davis, a QuickBooks Pro-Advisor, to help you.

So, let’s see what my Papa, Lee Davis has to say about Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks

Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks

1. Complete the setup by reviewing preferences.

After you have completed the setup and downloaded Quickbooks (QB), completing the preferences in QuickBooks will help you be more efficient and save time.

2. Review the chart of accounts, and add and delete accounts.

In the setup you choose the industry that closest represents your company. In the chart of accounts you can customize further your accounts in QuickBooks.

3. Using lists, set up: customers, vendors & employees.

QuickBooks is built on lists and forms. You will be more efficient if you completely set up your customers, vendors and employees, not forgetting their email addresses.

Building your items list will help you start invoicing and manage inventory for your business.

4. Understand the forms you will be using such as: estimates, invoices, purchase orders, bills, checks, payments, deposits and credit cards.

Using these forms correctly will give you a great start to entering your data in QuickBooks.

5. With the help of your QuickBooks Pro-Advisor, make the necessary journal entries.

There will be some data that will not be entered in lists and forms. These will require general journal entries. If you do not have an accounting background, use your QuickBooks Pro-Advisor to assist you here.

6. Reconcile your checking account in QuickBooks with your bank reconciliation.

Do not download your accounts directly into your cash accounts. Use the write check form. After you have completed the process, you will be ready to match your checks to your bank download. This is another area I recommend getting help with from your QuickBooks Pro-Advisor.

7. Run your first set of financial statements, including your income statement and balance sheet.

If you have completed the above steps you are ready to run your financial statements. Congratulations!

Did you like our Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks post?

For me, it was very informative.

My takeaways from this post on Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks:

1. I should have a QuickBooks Pro-Advisor help me with the set up.

I know, this must sound like a way to plug my father’s services, but I know that my papa is absolutely right. I have listened to him talk about cleaning up client’s messes too many times. When I set up my QuickBooks, I will ask my Papa to be there with me to make sure I set it up properly from day one.

2. I need to poke around QuickBooks to learn about the different features and ways to use it.

If you use any form of technology, it is always good to do some poking around to find out how you can best utilize the software.

QuickBooks is software that will help you rock your books if you use it fully and correctly. Without becoming familiar with all that it can do, you will not be able to rock your books.

3. I need to start out with making some journal entries.

Because I have a very limited understanding of QuickBooks, I am going to do some research on what journal entries are. Skip to the next point if you are beyond my abilities.

I found this very helpful YouTube video.

For journal entries, you will have to use your knowledge of debits and credits.

In your journal, you will list the date, what account the entry falls under (cash, owners equity, liabilities) and your credits and debits.

The reason you should do this with a Pro-Advisor is that QuickBooks will do the journal entries automatically for you after you tell it how to identify a transaction. If you do things incorrectly from the beginning, you will have a mess that a bookkeeper will need to correct later.

There are some manual entries that you will need to record yourself. These include:

  1. Unique transactions
  2. Adjusting entries

More on Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks

I talked to my Papa about this post, and he had a few more things to add to this post:

1. If you are starting a new business on QuickBooks, QuickBooks does most of the classifying for you.

This is very important. If you are a new startup, QuickBooks will be pretty easy to set up, and you don’t have to have much of an accounting background to set it up. But if you are moving your books over to QuickBooks after you have been in business for a while, you need to do a lot of journal entries, which requires a stronger background in accounting.

If your business is not a new startup, you will have to make many journal entries, and therefore, you will need a solid background in accounting to make the journal entries. This is where you will need to understand how to enter your debits and credits.

If you are bringing over your work, you will need to enter certain balances. This is where many mistakes are made. For example, cash does not require a journal entry because that is part of the bank reconciliation. This causes many of my clients problems.

2. The power of QuickBooks is that it gives you the other side of the double entry accounting.

The reason why everyone loves QuickBooks is that you don’t have to worry about making mistakes in your journal entries. In the set up process you are teaching QuickBooks how to make your journal entries. If you start out with wrong initial journal entries, you will have a QuickBooks mess.

3. If you are not a new business, you should take our training course.

Our training course has an advance section in which Lee Davis, my papa, will help you fix any messes you might have. Many of the messes occur in the setup process.

Conclusion – Trouble Shooting for Setting up QuickBooks

I am so grateful for my job as the chief blogger for Lee Davis and Company. It gives me the opportunity to learn something that has intimidated me, accounting. Since I too am a budding entrepreneur, I need my Papa’s help too.

I learned many useful lessons from this post, and I hope you did as well.

Please let us know in the comments if you have any other questions that Lee Davis can answer. We would love to help you.

How can Lee Davis and Company help you?

We would love to help you with your trouble shooting for setting up QuickBooks. One of our specialties is cleaning up messes. Since many of the QuickBooks messes come from the set up process, we could do a one-on-one training session to help you. We could also train you in our training courses, in which we could answer your individual questions.

Another option for you is that we could manage your books for you. If you would like to spend more time in your business and less time on your books, we could take over your books for you.

Lee Davis standing outside in the sunshine
Lee Davis and Company’s President, Lee Davis

What can you expect from Lee Davis and Company? 

Lee Davis is the president of Lee Davis and Company. He prides himself in helping his clients make their dreams of running a successful business a reality. He has the tools and advice that will help you, the client, get to the next level. 

What services can you find at Lee Davis and Company? 

  1. Bookkeeping Services
  2. Small Business Advising 
  3. Quickbooks Training
  4. Management Services


Set Up your Business with Quickbooks Detailed Start

If you are looking to set up your business with Quickbooks Detailed Start, this is the post for you. I love helping clients succeed with Quickbooks and that starts with a proper setup, so I’m glad you found this post.

Hopefully, I can give you the tips you need to set up your business with Quickbooks detailed start, so your Quickbooks run seamlessly. If you find yourself with a lot of errors, however, check out these post:

  1. How to fix errors in Quickbooks

OR

Sign up for our Free Mini-Course on How to Get Started in Quickbooks!

Choose between Express Start and Detailed Start

I have clients who are setting up Quickbooks for the first time who ask the question about the difference between setting up Quickbooks using Express Start (recommended for new users) compared to selecting the button called Detailed Start. This blog will outline the benefits of setting up Quickbooks using detailed start.

Quickbooks Detailed Start

When setting up Quickbooks if you click on detailed start you perform all the basic setup functions with some added benefits.  Those added benefits are:

A. Clearly Defines Your Business by Asking Questions About:

  1. What you sell
  2. How your customers pay you
  3. How you pay your bills.

Based on the answers Quickbooks sets preferences for the company file. The preferences enable certain features of the Quickbooks program.  

B. Questions About What You Sell

Answer the questions about what do you sell?

  1. Services only
  2. Products only
  3. Both services and products

C. Questions About How You Enter Sales

In the how you enter your sales in Quickbooks window, you choose the option that best fits your business needs.

My Tips for Entering Sales:

  1. Record each sale individually. You can use print sales receipts to give customers.
  2. Record only a summary of your daily weekly sales. If you use a cash register to ring up individual sales, you can enter the sales total for the days work in Quickbooks.
  3. Use Quickbooks point of sale. You can send the details of each individual sale into Quickbooks with just one click.

D. Entering Sales Tax information

In this part of the Easy Step interview the software asks you whether you charge sales tax. I want to caution you here, you should turn the sales tax setting off only if you never charge sales tax. Furthermore, sometimes it is beneficial to turn this feature on for tracking wholesale/retail sales, depending on the tax reporting regulations in your state.

E. Creating Estimates

If you provide any type of estimates or bid-even verbal quotes, there are many reason to use estimates in Quickbooks

  1. Prepare professional-looking itemized estimates, bids or proposals for your customers.
  2. Create an invoice from the estimate with just one click.  In fact, Quickbooks then creates an invoice using the information from your estimate.
  3. Create reports that compare your estimated costs and revenue against your actual costs and revenue.
  4. Compare your actual costs against what you estimated.
  5. Track which estimates are still active and easily update each estimate as you continue to negotiate with your customers.

F. Creating Sales Orders

Sales orders allow you to record an order for a sale before the sale actually is made. These forms are common in businesses that order products to fill orders or that pull orders from inventory before invoicing.

G. Choose remaining preferences

1. Billing statements  – Post statement charges independently of invoices & sales receipts.

   2.  Progress Invoicing – Create single estimates to invoices in phases.

   3. Bill tracking – Use the Accounts Payable module to track bills and bill payments.

     4. Inventory – Use inventory module to track inventory quantities and values.

     5. Track time – Use timecards to track employees and subcontractor time, and bill customers.

     6. Employee – Use payroll module to manage employee information and payroll.

You are not stuck with Detailed Start.

You can always change preferences setting later, after the detailed start has been completed. Changing the preferences later can be done by:

  1. accessing the Edit menu
  2. choosing preferences
  3. then selecting the preference type in the left panel

Tip: Choosing a Start Date

The start date is the date for which you give Quickbooks a financial snapshot of your company assets and liabilities before you start entering live transactions in Quickbooks. It is generally the last day of the previous fiscal period.

Why use Quickbooks Detailed Start?

The value of setting up Quickbooks with a detailed start means is that you spend less time adding information later. 

At Lee Davis & Company, we can assist you in setting up and training you in your new adventure called Quickbooks.

Lee Davis standing outside in the sunshine
Lee Davis

What can you expect from Lee Davis and Company? 

Lee Davis is the president of Lee Davis and Company. He prides himself in helping his clients make their dreams of running a successful business a reality. He has the tools and advice that will help you, the client, get to the next level. 

What services can you find at Lee Davis and Company? 

  1. Bookkeeping Services
  2. Small Business Advising 
  3. Quickbooks Training
  4. Management Services

Read more posts by Lee Davis 

  1. Main Street Relief Fund Application
  2. Getting your SBA Loan Approved
  3. Growth Mindset Development
  4. Adding Clients in Quickbooks


Adding Customers in Quickbooks

Adding customers in Quickbooks is an essential tool that Quickbooks offers, but I fear that many of my clients either don’t use the tool or don’t use it to its full potential. Thus, because I want to help more people use Quickbooks to its full potential, I would like to share with you how to add customers in Quickbooks.

Your Customer List is the list that will display sale forms (sales orders, estimates, invoices, sales receipts) and accounts receivable. Here are some steps that will help you get this very important task completed in Quickbooks.

Adding Customers in Quickbooks

1. To add a Customer

There are multiple ways to do almost anything in Quickbooks. To access the Customer Center, you have four options:

How to:

   1. Click Customers from the left hand or top icon (depending) on your View settings)

   2. Choose Customer Center from the Customers drop down in the menu bar.

   3. From the Home Screen, click on the blue Customers tab in the Customers section.

   4. Press CTRL+J

2. New Customer & Job

How to: Click the New Customer & Job Menu button, and than choose New Customer.

3. Customer Name

Definition: In the Customer Name field enter the name of the customer as you’d like to see it appear on your Customer & Job List. 

Tip: – Instead of filling in the Customer Name field, fill in the Company Name field, and it will populate the Customer Name field for you.

4. Opening Balance

How to: Press Tab in the Opening Balance field to leave this field blank.

Definition: The Opening Balance field tells you how much each customer owes you on your start date.

Why: The reason you need to use this field is that when you enter the rest of your transactions from the day after your start date, all balances since your start date will be accurate.

Tip: You should enter individuals outstanding invoices one by one whenever possible, rather than entering the outstanding balance owned in the Opening Balance field. (This will allow you to enter payments and be able to apply those payments to the open invoices.)

5. Complete Customer contact information

Tip: Pay close attention to getting the correct email addresses from your customers.

Sending your Invoices  & Customer Statements by email, will ensure you are paid as quickly as possible and your customers will enjoy the convenience of receiving an electronic invoice.

Conclusion – Adding Customers to Quickbooks

I hope this helps you understand adding Customers to Quickbooks. My goal with this blog and my training company is to help entrepreneurs use Quickbooks to better understand their business, so that I can help entrepreneurs strengthen their businesses.

Lee Davis - President of Lee Davis and Company
Lee Davis – President of Lee Davis and Company

What can you expect from Lee Davis and Company? 

Lee Davis is the president of Lee Davis and Company. He prides himself in helping his clients make their dreams of running a successful business a reality. He has the tools and advice that will help you, the client, get to the next level. 

What services can you find at Lee Davis and Company? 

  1. Bookkeeping Services
  2. Small Business Advising 
  3. Quickbooks Training
  4. Management Services

Read more posts by Lee Davis 

  1. Main Street Relief Fund Application
  2. Getting your SBA Loan Approved
  3. Growth Mindset Development


ADDING CUSTOMERS INTO QUICKBOOKS

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