Learning QuickBooks 03.23.09

I’m giving my parents a hand and am going to start doing the book-keeping for my dad’s work.  For the past 20+ years, they’ve always done everything on paper, and since I’m going to be doing them, I’m making the transition over to doing it all electronically in QuickBooks.  The plan is to finish this first quarter on paper while entering everything from Jan 1st up until that point in QuickBooks to get caught up, and then start doing it from there on out solely in the program.  I already have a good understanding of doing the book-keeping, and am actually looking forward to the completed transition and doing it all myself.

To get this going, I’ve purchased QuickBooks Pro 2009 and QuickBooks Payroll Basic.  The first initial setup, I thought that maybe the program was going to be too much to learn to quickly, and maybe overkill.  But after getting things sorted out, and seeing how the invoicing, billing, general ledger, reports, etc., work together, I think this is going to make it easy as pie.  Prior to picking up the software, I had created a fillable .PDF invoice template to use, which turned out very well.  I’m working on applying the look of it to the invoice template setup in QuickBooks which is turning out to be surprisingly easy.

Here’s a shot of how the setup looks for this particular type of business.  It’s pretty straight forward how everything works together.  And for the things that may not seem so clear, the ‘help’ section is great.