QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Sharing a Company File with Your Accountant

If you work with an accountant who uses QuickBooks, there are times when a tug-of-war over your company file is inevitable. You want to perform your day-to-day bookkeeping, but your accountant wants to review your books, correct mistakes you’ve made, enter journal entries to prepare your books for end-of-quarter or end-of-year reports, and so on. QuickBooks has two ways for you and your accountant to share:

• With an accountant’s review copy, you and your accountant can stop squabbling because you can each have your own copy of the company file. You work on everyday bookkeeping tasks while your accountant tackles cleaning up earlier periods.

• The external accountant user is a super-powered user (in QuickBooks 2009 and later) who can look at anything in your company file—except sensitive customer information like credit card numbers. You set up an external accountant user in your company file for your accountant so he can log into your file, review every nook and cranny of your company’s data (with QuickBooks’ Client Data Review tool designed specially for accountants), make changes, and keep track of which changes are his and which are yours.

This section explains how to use both these approaches.

Creating an Accountant’s Review Copy

The secret to an accountant’s review copy is a cutoff date that QuickBooks calls the dividing date. Transactions before this date are fair game for your accountant who can work in the comfort of his ...