QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating QuickBooks Users

QuickBooks has no way of knowing if several people share the same user name. If you want to protect your data or identify who's doing what in your financial records, each person who accesses your company file needs a unique user name and password. Setting up users in QuickBooks comes in handy for several reasons:

• Access by several people at the same time. If your business is booming and the only way to get the work done is by having several people work on the company file at the same time, you need multiple users in QuickBooks and the company file set to multi-user mode (see "Sharing Your Company File," below).

• Restricting access to QuickBooks features or sensitive information. Sometimes you want people to use QuickBooks on a need-to-know basis. For example, if your pay scales are horribly skewed, you might want to restrict access to payroll to only your most indifferent bookkeeper.

• Tracking transactions performed. If you fear financial finagling, you can turn on the audit trail feature (page 555). The audit trail shows any transactions that changed or have been deleted and, more important, who made the changes or deletions.

Adding New Users

Only the QuickBooks Administrator can create additional users. After you log in as the Administrator, here's how you create other users:

1. Choose Company→Set Up Users.

   QuickBooks opens the User List dialog box.

UP TO SPEED: Sharing Your Company File

You might set up several users for a company file, but that still doesn't ...