Quick Books® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Administering QuickBooks

In This Chapter

• Keeping your data confidential

• Using QuickBooks in a multi-user environment

• Closing QuickBooks

• Using QuickBooks for simultaneous multi-user access

• Maintaining good accounting controls

QuickBooks does something that's critically important to the success of your business: It collects and supplies financial information. For this reason, you want to have a firm understanding of how you can protect both the data that QuickBooks collects and stores and the assets that QuickBooks tracks. This chapter describes all this.

Keeping Your Data Confidential

Accounting data is often confidential information. Your QuickBooks data shows how much money you have in the bank, what you owe creditors, and how much (or how little!) profit your firm produces. Because this information is private, your first concern in administering a QuickBooks accounting system is to keep your data confidential.

You have two complementary methods for keeping your QuickBooks data confidential. The first method for maintaining confidentiality relies on the security features built into Microsoft Windows. The other method relies on QuickBooks security features.

Using Windows security

You can use the security provided by Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP to restrict access to a file — either a program file or a data file — to specific users. This means that you can use Windows-level security to say who can and can't use the QuickBooks program or access the QuickBooks ...