Welcome to my Quickbooks tutorial. This is the part of my site where I provide practical examples of how to apply the basic bookkeeping principles learned here to the use of bookkeeping software. I have chosen Quickbooks because it is the accounting program I have been using since 1995 and I have benefited immensely from its use during the course of my career as a professional bookkeeper.
Quickbooks is more than a bookkeeping or accounting program. It is a way to manage almost every aspect of a small business if you take advantage of its many great features. You can just get by using a few of its basic features or you can determine to really learn the program in depth and use it as a business management tool.
For example, helping you manage customers is something Quickbooks does very well. Not only can you store names, addresses and phone numbers, but you can also process payments by credit card and email invoices, statements, estimates and more. You can organize your customers by type and even associate them with different sales reps and set different price levels for each customer.
Because Quickbooks has been around for many years now, Intuit has constantly added and updated features that have made the program increasingly more and more user friendly. The nice things about Intuit is that it gathers information from users and looks at suggestions for new features that can be added or ways of making existing features better or easier to use. For example, Quickbooks allows you to create customized statements and invoices that can look colorful and professional.
Something that is important to me as a bookkeeper is workflow. The more steps it takes to get something done, the less enthusiastic I am about doing it. Work flow with Quickbooks is smooth and easy, especially as you gain more experience with it and know how to set up such things as memorized reports. Entering transactions is easy and you don’t need to keep reaching for the mouse while you are performing data entry. Many other accounting programs are sluggish in that department.
This tutorial is meant to provide you with a solid foundation for getting started using it in bookkeeping. Whether you are an outsourced bookkeeper, an employee who does bookkeeping for an employer, or a small business owner doing your own bookkeeping, the more efficient you become with Quickbooks the more valuable you will become in the workplace.
This Quickbooks tutorial is a work in progress and will be created in such a way to allow you to jump in wherever you want. Quickbooks can be used for business, non profit and personal use. You don’t have to be a bookkeeper or accountant to benefit from this tutorial, so please take the time to educate yourself and see how the software can be of the best use to you.