After you've installed QuickBooks on your system, you'll see this icon now loaded on
your Desktop called QuickBooks Pro 2008. You can go ahead and double-click this icon
and it's going to go ahead and launch QuickBooks. QuickBooks is launched and this brings you
to this Main menu here that gives you some choices. What we want to do is we're
going to Create a new company file. If you are upgrading from a previous version
of QuickBooks Pro, you could go to Open an existing file and if you had 2006 or
2007, it would take you through the conversion process. For our exercise today, we're going
to be creating a new company file so we're going to click on that icon.
This is the easy step interview startup screen and you'll notice at the very
top here we have the Start interview button. This will launch the easy step interview.
And down here towards the bottom left we have Convert data. This is what I
was speaking about in our earlier movie where if you were coming in from Quicken, or
Peachtree, or MS Accounting software. At this point you could click on
Convert data and this would launch you into a new wizard for converting the data
from those programs into QuickBooks. Also if you're an old pro, very familiar with QuickBooks,
don't feel you need to go through the interview process,
at this point you could skip the interview. Just enter in your company information
and then go right into QuickBooks. For our exercise today, we're going to go ahead and
start the interview. Our first screen is Enter your company information.
If you look here at the top, you'll see this red asterisk. And notice at the
bottom here, this tells you what that means. It's a required field.
So what QuickBooks is telling you is that in this screen shot the only required information
it needs is your company name. However, because we are setting up a brand-new
company in QuickBooks we're going to go ahead and fill in all the
information that we have pertaining to this company. OK, I'm going to go ahead and type
in our company name. The name of our company is Eat Cake Patisserie.
If I hit the Tab key, you notice that it autofills in the name in the
Legal name section. Normally, the company name and the legal name would be the same.
The exception to this rule is if you're operating under a DBA. A DBA is a doing business
as name, meaning that I have a legal name for my entity, however, I
do business as this name. An example of that would be if my legal name was Suzanne Robertson
Incorporated, but I was doing business as Suzanne Robertson.
Thereby I would have two different names. In this case our company name and our legal
name is the same. So we're going to leave it as such.
My federal tax ID number that I need to complete in this field again is provided on your tax
return form. The number will depend on how your organization
is held. Are you incorporated? Are you a sole proprietorship or a limited
liability corporation? If you're unsure of the number to populate
in this field you should check with your accountant or CPA. Our company is a
corporation so we're going to go ahead and fill in our Federal tax ID number.
(Typing.)
And to our next field which is our Street address and we're going to go ahead and complete
that right now as well.
(Typing.) And we're going to complete the Phone number.
And for the purpose of this exercise all of this information that I am filling in for
our company is fictitious. You would complete, of course, all of your actual information
for your company. And we're going to enter our E-mail address.
(Typing.) At this point we can go ahead and click on
Next. Select your industry allows QuickBooks to
know what type of business you're running so we can turn on certain features
within the program that'll best suit your business needs. You can see there's a long
list to choose from. If you cannot find your type of business, simply choose
the one that is closest to it. QuickBooks will assign features to that industry and
then later on you can choose to turn them off or select other features that you feel
may be a more appropriate for your business.
We are going to select Restaurants and catering or bar.
And we're going to click on Next.
How is your company organized? This is where QuickBooks asks you how is your company organized
or held. Are you a corporation, also known as a regular or C
corp? Are you sole proprietorship or perhaps a limited liability corp?
After selecting the type of business entity you are, QuickBooks will know what type of
tax form is best suited for your entity. We're going to go and select a Corporation
for our business entity.
QuickBooks is now asking to select your first month of your fiscal year.
And as we discussed previously, you have to determine what 12 months you want to use for
reporting of your financial information. As you can see QuickBooks defaults to January
because that is the recommended timeframe for starting. We're going to go
ahead and leave that, but if you notice there is a dropdown arrow and if you click in it,
it does give you all 12 months of the year for you to choose from. So if you had
an alternate timeframe to start with, you would simply select that month
and it would populate in this field. We're going to go ahead and leave it selected for
January.
QuickBooks allows you to add a password to your system to protect your company file and
its contents. Generally, passwords are used in a multiuser environment but you
can use them for single-user as well. In a multiuser environment not only are you
allowed to assign passwords to each user, but you can assign levels of authority or
areas of the data they can access based on that password. This comes in handy when you
have someone who perhaps is just a bookkeeper for your company
and all you want them to be able to access is your payroll section, but you don't want
them to see any other data within the company. Or perhaps you have someone who's
just the accounts receivable clerk and you do not want them to have access to
your payroll or accounts payable information. You can assign them a password in that level
of authority and QuickBooks will limit them as far as the data they can see
in all other areas of the company. You always have to set one person up as the
administrator who has access to all areas of the company. You can also use it in an
area where there are only is a single-user, and
by turning on the password feature you're preventing other people who may
have access to your computer to be able to access your file. Passwords are optional,
you do not have to turn them on. But they are a good security feature and we do recommend
at least one person having a password for for accessing the company file. For exercise
purposes today, we're going to leave this feature off. But
I would strongly recommend, whether you're in a multiuser environment or single-user,
that for your own company file you do assign a password.
At this point we're ready to create our company file. We're going to go ahead and click
on Next. And QuickBooks is going to take us into our
File Save as window. And here we have our choices of where we're
going to locate our company file and what we're going to name it. QuickBooks
will default on your system and you can choose to change those defaults if you like. That
will be based on your own company business needs. If you notice at the top here
you have the Save in window and it shows you where it's going to be saving the file. At
that time you can choose to save it in another place. We're going to go ahead and leave it
in the default. You can see that QuickBooks also has populated
our company name as our file name and we're going to go ahead and leave
it as such. And it is giving us the default file type, which is how we want to save it.
We don't want to change that file type structure. Now we are going to click on Save.
We've completed the first half of our easy step interview and in the next movie we will