Quickbooks Setup – What’s Needed?

This page starts a fairly lengthy discussion that presents an overview of setting up Quickbooks.  When written as a Word document, the discussion takes a little over five pages.  Instead of presenting the discussion in one very long web page, it has been divided into multiple web pages. Below is a table of contents which also provides linkes to the various pages.

Quickbooks Setup – What’s Needed?

Setting up Quickbooks needs to be discussed as two separate processes. The more obvious of the two is the process of interfacing with Quickbooks and entering all of the information needed to configure Quickbooks and populate the various accounts. This can be done either by employees of the business or by a third party hired for the task. Quickbooks provides good documentation and support on how to set up the system. Physical setup documentation is not replicated in this paper.

The physical setup cannot be done until the business decides what it needs from the system. This can be started by creating a wish list containing the information the company needs daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Once it is known what is needed, then Quickbooks can be configured to capture and present the needed information.

Happily, Quickbooks provides preconfigured reports and account definitions (sample Chart of Accounts) which make the job of defining what is needed easier. The paper titled, Why Bookkeeping? Why Quickbooks? provides an overview of the informational and operational support provided to the small company by Quickbooks. This paper provides an overview of the information that needs to be defined and gathered to be used in the physical system setup.