Stephen L. Nelson - QuickBooks 2020 For Dummies

QuickBooks 2020 For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950775

ISBN: 978-1-119-58969-3 (pbk); 978-1-119-58975-4 (ebk); 978-1-119-58984-6 (ebk)

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 15
4. Chapter 19
5. Chapter 20
6. Chapter 22

1. Chapter 2
2. Chapter 3
3. Chapter 4
4. Chapter 5
5. Chapter 6
6. Chapter 7
7. Chapter 8
8. Chapter 9
9. Chapter 10
10. Chapter 11
11. Chapter 12
12. Chapter 13
13. Chapter 14
14. Chapter 15
15. Chapter 16
16. Chapter 17
17. Chapter 18
18. Chapter 21
19. Chapter 23

Running a small business is one of the coolest things a person can do. Really. I mean it. Sure, sometimes the environment is dangerous kind of like the Old West but its an environment in which you have the opportunity to make tons of money. And its also an environment in which you can build a company or a job that fits you perfectly.

By comparison, many brothers and sisters working in big-company corporate America are furiously trying to fit their round pegs into painfully square holes. Yuck.

Youre wondering, of course, what any of this has to do with this book or with QuickBooks. Quite a lot, actually. The whole purpose of this book is to make it easier for you to run (or work in) a small business by using QuickBooks.

As you start your reading, though, I want to tell you a couple of things about this book.

First off, know that I fiddled a bit with the Windows and QuickBooks display settings. I noodled around with the font settings and some of the colors, for example. The benefit is that the pictures of the QuickBooks windows and dialog boxes in this book are easier to read. And thats good. But the cost is that my pictures look a little bit different from what you see on your screen. And thats not good. In the end, however, what the publisher found is that people are happier with increased readability.

Next point: To make the best use of your time and energy, you should know about the conventions that I use in this book. Those conventions are as follows:

• When I want you to type something, such as With a stupid grin, Martin watched the tall blonde strut into the bar and order grappa, its in bold type. When I want you to type something thats short and uncomplicated, such as Jennifer, it still appears in boldface type.
• Except for passwords, you dont have to worry about the case of the letters you type in QuickBooks. If I tell you to type Jennifer, you can type JENNIFER or follow poet e. e. cummingss lead and type jennifer.
• Whenever I tell you to choose a command from a menu, I say something like Choose ListsItems, which simply means to first choose the Lists menu and then choose Items. Theseparates one part of the command from the next part.
• You can choose menus, commands, and dialog-box elements with the mouse. Just click the thing you want.
• When I provide step-by-step descriptions of tasks something I do regularly within the pages of this tome I describe the tasks by using bold text and then, below the boldfacing, give a more detailed explanation. You can skip the text that accompanies the step-by-step boldface directions if you already understand the process.

I make three assumptions about you:

• You have a PC running Microsoft Windows. (I took pictures of the QuickBooks windows and dialog boxes while using Windows 10, in case youre interested.)
• You know a little bit about how to work with your computer.
• You have or will buy a copy of QuickBooks for each computer on which you want to run the program.

This book works for QuickBooks 2020 (and with the equivalent version of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, which is named Enterprise Solutions 20), although in a pinch, you can probably use it for QuickBooks 2018 or 2019 too. (I have to say, however, that if you have QuickBooks 2018, you may want to return this book and trade it in for