QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Classes

Not everyone needs classes, so don't feel you must use them. However, classes are the only solution if you want to classify income and expenses by business unit, department, location, partner, consultant, or other categories that span multiple accounts in your Chart of Accounts or multiple types of customers, jobs, and vendors.

Tip

Before you decide to turn on classes, use QuickBooks without them for a few weeks or months. If you can generate all the reports you need without classes, don't burden yourself with another field to enter. For example, if you run restaurants in a couple of locations, you don't necessarily need classes to track your business for each restaurant. You can create income accounts for each location instead.

If you decide to work with classes, be sure to follow these guidelines to get the most out of them:

UP TO SPEED : Do You Need Classes?

You can call on several QuickBooks features (such as ac-counts, customer and job types, and classes) to help you track your business. Each trackng feature has its advantages, so how do you decide which ones to use to evaluate your performance? Here's a brief description of each and the best time to use them:

Accounts.You can use accounts to segregate income and expenses in several ways. For instance, keep income from your physical store separate from your Web site sales by creating two separate income accounts. Accounts are the fastest way to see performance, because profit and loss reports built into QuickBooks (page ...