Setting up Accounts In QuickBooks

You are now ready in the Quickbooks EasyStep Interview to set up your Chart of accounts, one of the most important parts of setting up any bookkeeping system. It is very important that you set this up correctly which is why it is so good to go through the EasyStep Interview.

Don’t worry. Once you set this up using the interview you can make changes to it in the future. Many times I have had to reorganize a chart of accounts, by simply changing names, deleting or adding accounts. It is not something you want to do very often, but sometimes you find that you want to add another account for tracking an expense separately from others or creating different kinds of income accounts to track your different kinds of revenue.

Let’s get started.

Select a date to start tracking your finances.

Choose your fiscal year your company uses.

Add your bank account.

You can do this step now or later. Maybe you have just set up your business but don’t have a bank account. You can return to the interview later to do this part.

Here, you enter your bank account name giving it any name you like, such as checking, savings or bank account. The account number and routing number are not necessary unless you will be using features such as online banking or making federal deposits from Quickbooks. The account currency is required if you chose to track multiple currencies.

Also, choose one of the options given for when you opened your bank account, whether it was before, on or after the beginning of the year. Quickbooks assumes you will be starting your accounting from the first day of your fiscal year in this interview. For this tutorial, we will use January 1st as the beginning of the fiscal year.

If you choose ‘before’ the end of the year, you will need to find your December bank statement and enter it’s ending date and the ending balance as your beginning balance.

If you choose ‘on’ the 1st of the year (January 1st), you enter the amount of your opening deposit here. If you choose ‘after’ the 1st, it will create a bank account without an opening balance. You will be able to enter your opening deposit later on in bank account register in your company file.

If you have had this bank account for a while and are just beginning to use Quickbooks then you need to decide for which month of the year you will begin using Quickbooks. For example, if it is July and you don’t want to enter any information for the first six months of the year, then choose after the beginning of the year and July 1st as the day you opened your account. Next, find your June bank statement and enter its ending balance as the opening balance for your account.

You are almost done with the Quickbooks EasyStep Interview.

Review bank accounts

You have the option here to review what you entered and choose to enter another account if you like.

Review income and expense accounts

Here you will get your first look at the chart of accounts that Quickbooks has set up for you. The ones that are checked are the recommended accounts. You can check others if you want to add or uncheck if you want to remove an account from your list.

After this you can setup an online intuit account which is a good idea so that you can have access to Quickbooks forums by intuit. You can skip this option for now if you like and join in the future.

Congratulations! You have reached the end of the Quickbooks EasyStep Interview. At this point, the Quickbooks learning center will open with a list of some tutorials for you to get started. You can choose to view some or choose the ‘Go to Quickbooks’ button in the bottom right corner of the window. You are now done setting up Quickbooks and it is time to begin using your company file for your business’ bookkeeping.