QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Dealing with the Chart of Accounts List

I saved the best for last. After you get done setting up your lists, you still need to finalize one list: the Chart of Accounts. The Chart of Accounts just lists the accounts you and QuickBooks use to track income and expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity.

This is kind of a funny step, however, because a bunch of Chart of Accounts stuff is already set up. So what you’re really doing here is just finalizing the chart of accounts. Typically, this consists of two or possibly three separate steps: describing customer balances, describing vendor balances, and entering the rest of the trial balance.

Describing customer balances

If you entered customer unpaid invoice totals when you set up the customers — which is what I recommend — you’ve already described your customer balances. You, my friend, can skip ahead to the next section, “Describing vendor balances.”

If you didn’t enter customer unpaid invoice totals, you need to supply that information before you finalize the Chart of Account information. To do this, enter the invoice in the usual way, which I describe in Chapter 4. The one really important thing to do is use the original invoice date when you enter the invoice.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, dude. The order of your instructions is all screwed up. Here I am, slogging through Chapter 3, and now totally out of the blue, you’re telling me that I have to jump ahead to Chapter 4 and read that?”

Yeah, well, that’s right. This ...