QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual

Chapter 23. Configuring Preferences to Fit Your Company

An organization’s approach to accounting often depends on the type of business and its objectives, policies, procedures, and industry. For example, maybe you want inventory tracking and payroll—but maybe you don’t. The way you and your accountant like to work also influences your organization’s accounting practices. For instance, you might prefer the simplicity of cash accounting to the more intimate pairing of income and expenses that accrual accounting offers (see Accounting Basics: The Important Stuff).

Enter QuickBooks, which has the Herculean task of satisfying every nuance of business operation and personal proclivity. The program’s preferences are configurable settings that accommodate different business approaches and personal tastes. During installation, QuickBooks picks the settings likely to work for a majority of organizations. And if you set up your company file using the QuickBooks Setup feature (Options for Creating a Company File), you might already have most preferences set the way you want.

But you can change the program’s preferences to control all sorts of QuickBooks behaviors and features, such as whether you create estimates for jobs you go after and how you calculate the amount of inventory that’s available. Preferences also let you turn on QuickBooks’ features, such as inventory and payroll. Using QuickBooks for a while can make it clear which preferences you need to change. This chapter presents all the ...