Stephen L. Nelson - QuickBooks 2014 All-in-One For Dummies

QuickBooks 2014 All-in-One For Dummies

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Copyright 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948035

ISBN 978-1-118-72008-0 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-72105-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-72114-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-72115-5 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Introduction

F ew people read introductions to reference books, so Ill make this very brief. I just want to tell you which versions of QuickBooks this book works for, whats in the reference, what it assumes about your existing skills, and what conventions I use.

About This Book

QuickBooks comes in several flavors, including QuickBooks Simple Start, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. This reference talks about QuickBooks 2014 Premier, which is nearly identical to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions and is a superset of QuickBooks Pro. If youre using QuickBooks Simple Start which is the simplest, most bare-bones version of QuickBooks you shouldnt use this book. Sorry. Fortunately, I have a solution of sorts for you. You may want to get another book Ive written: QuickBooks Simple Start For Dummies . That book covers the Simple Start version of QuickBooks in friendly detail.

On the other hand, even though this book is written for QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions and QuickBooks Premier, if youre using QuickBooks Pro, dont worry. Youre just fine with this book. And dont freak out if youre using some version of QuickBooks thats very similar to QuickBooks 2014, such as QuickBooks 2013 or QuickBooks 2015. Although this reference is about QuickBooks 2014, it also works just fine for the 2012, 2013, and probably 2015 versions of QuickBooks because QuickBooks is a very mature product at this point. The changes from one year to the next are modest. This means that if youre using QuickBooks 2012, stuff may look a little different if you closely compare the images in this book with what you see on your screen, but the information in this reference will still apply to your situation.

Note, too, that specialty versions of QuickBooks, such as QuickBooks Accountants Edition and QuickBooks Contractors, also work almost identically to QuickBooks Premier.

If you use QuickBooks Pro and see some whistle or bell that you really want to use but that isnt available in your version of QuickBooks, youll know that you should upgrade to the Premier version of QuickBooks.

The bottom line? Yes, QuickBooks comes in several flavors. Yes, Intuit publishes new editions of its QuickBooks products every year. But you can use this book for any recent version of QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise Solutions.

To make the best use of your time and energy, you should know about the conventions I use in this book:

When I want you to type something such as Jennifer, its in bold letters.

By the way, except for passwords, you dont have to worry about the case of the stuff you type in QuickBooks. If I tell you to type Jennifer, you can type JENNIFER. Or you can 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. The separates one part of the command from the next part.

You can choose menus and commands and select dialog-box elements with the mouse. Just click the thing that you want to select.

While Im on the subject of conventions, let me also mention something about QuickBooks conventions, because it turns out that theres really no good place to point this out. QuickBooks doesnt use document windows the same way that other Windows programs do. Instead, it locks the active window into place and then displays a list of windows in its Navigator pane, which is like another little window. To move to a listed window, you click it.