welcome to our third video in the series of QuickBooks for home finance video 3 preparing
your file we will use two specific windows and QuickBooks to prepare the file for home use we
will use the Preferences window and we will use the customize icon bar window the Preferences
window is simply the defaults window you can consider it the settings or the options it's
the window that controls the automatic behavior of the software and every program has a default
window that does this let's take a look at what we need to do from the top left of the main menu
click edit and the very bottom choice and the submenu is preferences here is your Preferences
window when you click on the Left panel you get different categories of preferences every
category of preference has two sections the my preference tab and the company preference tab we
will be addressing specific items here to make your experience go very smoothly first click
the top category accounting I don't like that warnings pop-up when you put any date you want in
a transaction so let's click these two checkmarks and remove the requirement for QuickBooks to warn
us if we put in a date too far in the past or too far in the future we can click OK and reopen the
window or we can simply click on a different category if we click on a different category
you might get a warning message so we'll address that in a moment I don't like this home window I
believe it confuses people especially if you're using QuickBooks for home finance however if
you close it it will keep opening up when you open the file so if you click Edit preferences
and you click this category desktop view you can click to remove the check mark so that the home
window will no longer pop up I also think it's a bad idea for quickbooks to try to remember
everything that was on your desktop when you closed the file it can be very messy there's
no important customer company preferences in the desktop view now again you could click OK but if
you simply click another category you'll get a warning from QuickBooks you want to save the
changes that you made in this category you can just click yes now here's where you really make
your experience more convenient you should click this box turn off pop-up messages for products and
services they can be very distracting when you're trying to use QuickBooks and every time you click
on something you know it's a hey QuickBooks can do this for you hey QuickBooks can do that for
you just click this check mark and it will turn it off if you like QuickBooks - beep every time
you save something you can leave this check mark if you don't like it you can click to remove the
only other preference that you need to change to make your experience a smooth one is down here
when you click reports and graphs again click yes to save the changes from the other category
and I believe it's very important to click here and make your reports refresh automatically this
way as soon as you save a transaction the report that shows your results will change immediately
click OK and that's pretty much all you need to do to adjust your preferences and your defaults and
your settings to work with QuickBooks for home finance now let's prepare the icon bar from the
main menu the first thing you should do is click view and put the icon bar on top that's a more
traditional view and it's easier to see and manage the icons that you will use to customize this bar
to your preference into your liking click view and click customize icon bar and the customize icon
bar window opens up I suggest you click delete and remove every single item on the icon bar this is
because we will be putting up the icons that we need as we go along and will we will be putting
them in an order that is very smooth and easy to use we will learn more features of the customize
icon bar as we apply it to setting up the file click OK and now we're ready for the next step