QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Opening Balances

The Opening Balances section asks you about how much your customers owe you, how much you owe your vendors, and how much money you have in accounts that appear on your balance sheet (credit cards, loans, bank accounts, and so on). Unless you desperately need to pass the time, choose No when QuickBooks asks if any customer owed you money or you owed money to any vendors as of the start date. Like creating accounts, creating customers and vendors is much easier and more thorough outside the EasyStep Interview. To learn how to create customers, see page 47. For information on setting up vendors, see page 104.

Note

If you enter a customer balance during the EasyStep Interview, QuickBooks creates one invoice for the entire customer balance. Then, when you receive a payment, QuickBooks deducts the payment from that one invoice. You can't tell if the customer missed a payment, paid an invoice late, or paid the wrong amount. Unless you've got stacks of invoices to enter, consider skipping this section of the EasyStep Interview and recreating each unpaid invoice, as described on page 221. By creating invoices with details such as dates and items sold, you can apply payments to the correct invoices and track what you've sold in the past.

QuickBooks also gives you an opportunity to set opening balances for asset accounts (things you own), liability accounts (money you owe), and equity accounts (the difference between how much you own and owe). If you collected all the paperwork ...