QuickBooks 2015 For Dummies. Nelson Stephen L.

QuickBooks Lists

       In This Chapter

      ▶ Adding items to the Item list

      ▶ Adding employees to the Employee list

      ▶ Adding new customers and jobs

      ▶ Adding new vendors

      ▶ Understanding and using the other lists

      ▶ Organizing, printing, and exporting lists

      ▶ Dealing with the Chart of Accounts list

      The QuickBooks Setup (which I discuss at some length in Chapter 2) doesn’t actually get QuickBooks completely ready to use. You also need to enter additional information about your products, employees, customers, and vendors (and a handful of other items) into lists. In this chapter, I describe how you create and work with these lists. I also describe how you clean up some of the accounting messiness created when you enter information into these lists.

       The Magic and Mystery of Items

      The first QuickBooks list you need to finish setting up is the Item list – the list of stuff you buy and sell. Before you start adding to your Item list, however, I need to tell you that QuickBooks isn’t very smart about its view of what you buy and sell. It thinks that anything you stick on a sales invoice or a purchase order is something you’re selling.

      If you sell colorful coffee mugs, for example, you probably figure (and correctly so) that you need to add descriptions of each of these items to the Item list. However, if you add freight charges to an invoice, QuickBooks thinks that you’re adding another mug. And if you add sales tax to an invoice, well, guess what? QuickBooks again thinks that you’re adding another mug.

      This wacky definition of items is confusing at first. But just remember one thing, and you’ll be okay: You aren’t the one who’s stupid: QuickBooks is. No, I’m not saying that QuickBooks is a bad program. It’s a wonderful accounting program and a great tool. What I’m saying is that QuickBooks is only a dumb computer program; it isn’t an artificial-intelligence program. It doesn’t pick up on the little subtleties of business – such as the fact that even though you charge customers for freight, you aren’t really in the shipping business.

      Each entry on the invoice or purchase order – the mugs that you sell, the subtotal, the discount, the freight charges, and the sales tax – is an item. Yes, I know this setup is weird, but getting used to the wackiness now makes the discussions that follow much easier to understand.

      If you want to see a sample invoice, take a peek at Figure 3-1.

      Do you see those first three items: Rainbow mugs, Yellow mugs, and Blue mugs? You can see the sense of calling them items, right? These mugs are things that you sell.

      But then suppose that you give frequent buyers of your merchandise a 10 percent discount. To include this discount in your accounting, you need to add a Subtotal item to tally the sale and then a Discount item to calculate the discount. Figure 3-1 also shows this. See it? Kind of weird, eh?

      Then look at the Shipping and Handling item, which charges the customer $50 for freight. Yep, that’s right – another item. In sum, everything that appears on an invoice or a purchase order is an item that you need to describe in your Item list.

      Just above the invoice total, if you look closely, you can see another item for including sales tax on your invoices – and that’s really an item, too.