Quick Books® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Setting Up QuickBooks

In This Chapter

• Planning your new QuickBooks system

• Installing QuickBooks

• Dealing with the system pre-interview jitters

• Running the EasyStep Interview

• Filling the EasyStep Interview holes

In order to use QuickBooks, you need to do two things: install the QuickBooks software and run the setup interview, which is called the EasyStep Interview. This chapter gives a bird's-eye view of both of these tasks. I also want to spend just a few paragraphs talking about some of the planning that you should do before you set up QuickBooks, and some of the missing setup steps in the EasyStep Interview — things it should do but doesn't. (Don't worry: I tell you how to complete the missing steps — partly at the end of this chapter and also in the next chapter.)

Planning Your New QuickBooks System

I start with a couple of big picture discussions: what accounting does and what accounting systems do. If you understand this big picture stuff from the very start, you'll find that the QuickBooks setup process makes a whole lot more sense.

What accounting does

Think about what accounting does. People may argue about the little details, but most would agree that accounting does the following four important things:

• Measures profits and losses

• Reports on a financial condition of a firm (its assets, liabilities, and net worth)

• Provides detailed records of the assets, liabilities, and owner's equity accounts

• Supplies financial information to stakeholders, especially to management

What accounting ...