Microcomputer Accounting Applicationslesson 8 New Company Setup

Microcomputer Accounting ApplicationsLesson 8 New Company Setup

Note: These comments do not replace the material in the chapter. They are intended to reinforce and highlight important data from the text as well as to review relevant accounting principles. You should always thoroughly read your text while completing the tutorial steps.

Lesson 8 Comments

In Chapter 8, you will learn to set up a new company file in QuickBooks. You will use the EasyStep Interview to accomplish this task. In the EasyStep Interview, the business owner answers a series of questions that QuickBooks uses to establish the settings for a new company file. To use the EasyStep Interview, choose File>New Company, then choose the Detailed Start option.

EasyStep Interview – Opening Balances

The EasyStep Interview can be used to set up a new as well as an existing company. If you are creating a QuickBooks file for a new company, you will have no opening account balances. When creating a QuickBooks file for an existing company, you can enter your opening Cash Balance in the EasyStep Interview. Any existing balances in Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable should be entered when the customer or vendor is set up in QuickBooks. For merchandising companies, inventory value and items-on-hand balances are established in the New Item window. Be sure to use the Start Date entered in the EasyStep Interview as your Opening Balance Date.

Start Date

Your start date is the date you want to begin tracking your business in QuickBooks. You can choose any start date that you want. If you are setting up QuickBooks for a brand new company, the start date should be set to the date you begin your business.

The start date for an existing company can be more complicated. Three common options for the start date of an existing company are

·  the date you begin using QuickBooks

·  the date on which you started your business

·  the beginning of the current fiscal year

To decide what start date to use for an existing company, first decide how important having all your business data loaded in QuickBooks is to you. For all your business data to be stored in QuickBooks, you will need to enter historical transactions and will need to have complete and accurate accounting data available to enter into QuickBooks. The process of entering historical transactions into a new QuickBooks file can be quite cumbersome, so you may choose to set the start date for your existing company as of the date you begin using QB or the beginning of the current fiscal year.

Once the new file is created, you will work with the chart of accounts, the customer and vendor lists, and the item list. You have worked with all of these areas in previous lessons.

In this tutorial, you will be given the information to enter in the EasyStep Interview for a new business. If you were a business owner going through this process, you would answer the questions appropriately for your company. For the course project, you will create a new company file and answer the EasyStep Interview questions from a company narrative.

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