QuickBooks 2021 For Dummies. Stephen L. Nelson

you want to use accrual-basis accounting, you need to make an adjustment.

      These chores aren’t time-consuming, but they’re the three most complicated tasks that you need to do to set up QuickBooks. (If you aren’t sure what the big deal is about accrual-basis accounting, I respectfully suggest that you take a break here and read Appendix B.)

      To set up the inventory records, you just identify the item counts you hold in inventory, as described in Chapter 3.

To set up your customer receivables and (if necessary) vendor payables, you first need to enter customer invoices that were prepared before the conversion date but are still uncollected at conversion, as described in Chapter 4. Similarly, you may need to enter vendor payables that were incurred before the conversion date but are still unpaid at conversion.

      I talk about this stuff more in Chapter 3, so if you’re still okay with doing some more installation and setup work, go ahead and flip there. However …

Should You Get Your Accountant’s Help?

      Should you get help from your accountant? Oh, shoot, I don’t know. If you follow my directions carefully (both in this chapter and the next), and your business financial affairs aren’t wildly complex, I think you can probably figure out all this stuff on your own.

      Having said that, however, I suggest that you at least think about getting your accountant’s help at this juncture. Your accountant can do a much better job of giving you advice that may be specific to your situation. In many cases, your accountant can give you beginning trial balance amounts that agree with your tax returns. He or she probably knows your business and can keep you from making a terrible mess of things in case you don’t follow my directions carefully.

      Just so you know: One of the things that I (as a CPA) do for my clients is help them set up QuickBooks. Because I do this, I can give you a couple of pieces of useful information about getting a CPA’s help in setting up:

       Your CPA (assuming that he or she already knows QuickBooks) should be able to help you through the setup process in a couple of hours in most cases, so he or she can do it (or help you do it) much faster than you can on your own.

       Another (a third) hour or so of tutoring from your CPA should mean that you get enough help to record all your usual transactions.

      With just this help, you can find out how to pay your bills, invoice customers exactly the way you want, and produce reports. I used to pooh-pooh this kind of hand-holding, but the older (and, I hope, wiser) I get, the more I see that business owners and bookkeepers benefit from this up-front help. A bit of planning and expert advice in the beginning can save you a whole lot of trouble later.