My wife runs a home-based travel business. I help out part-time (I have my own unrelated full time job) managing the finances, doing data entry and other stuff. We have someone else who works part time doing filing and similar stuff. None of us knows much about accounting.
Our new accountant has asked us to switch to Quickbooks (we’d previously been using a combination of Excel and Quicken to keep track of our customer records and finances) for the 2014 tax year. I realize that Quicken is not really suited to what we’re doing, but it was pretty easy to learn, especially for a non-finance guy, and Quickbooks looks a lot more complicated (we haven’t bought it yet).
What I’m looking for the best way to learn how to use Quickbooks for our situation, and the basic accounting principles behind it. We can’t really afford (nor do we have the time for) classroom training.
You should be able to send your company file to the accountant and have them set up all the accounts they want you to use, set up payroll and show you how to do an invoice and receive payments. Quickbooks help is pretty good - they connect you to their online knowledge base if the in-app help isn’t enough.
I taught myself QB. It can be insanely complex or incredibly easy. It just does (more or less) what you want it to do. I have one file that has an enormous amount of data. Payroll, probably 150 vendors, several hundred customers. I make journal entries every day, I run reports all the time etc etc etc… I have another file that I use to keep track of a bank account that has about 4 transactions a month and nothing more.
Have your accountant set it up the way they want it set up, have them show you how they want things entered and you’ll learn it quickly. Just make sure to do back ups and as long as you backed up, you can go poking around, you won’t break anything and if you do you can just restore the data (it’s easy).
Something that I did when I was learning about journal entries, and how things worked with the balance sheet and profit & loss statement would be to make some sort of adjustment or deposit for some huge number, say, a million dollars. That would make it jump out all over the books as I would then run various reports. It really helped me understand some of the inner workings.
Also, there are some QB classes you can take. I took one, for me it was a waste of time. The people taking this class were, well, they shouldn’t have been running financial software. One person had set up all of her employees as customers (from which you normally receive payments) and then issued them credits each week, cut a check based on the credits and that’s how she did payroll. Her books must have been a train wreck.
If you do your payroll properly (and there is a charge for the tax tables (QB ain’t cheap)), it’ll help you with all your taxes.
You might consider going to your local college and taking Accounting 101, it’ll give you a better grasp on a lot of the things you need to know.
But seriously, have your accountant get you set up, have him show you the ropes, and it’s pretty easy to teach yourself.