QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

About This Book

Despite the many improvements in QuickBooks over the years, one feature has grown consistently worse: Intuit documentation. For a topic as complicated as accounting software, all you get with QuickBooks is a small Fundamentals manual, which is little more than a guide to tasks QuickBooks performs, with a reference to the Help topic for each. Any detail to be found is in the program's online help.

Even if you have no problem reading instructions in one window as you work in another, you'll quickly discover that QuickBooks help is often unworthy of the screen space it consumes. Topics are terse, offer little in the way of technical background or troubleshooting tips, and lack useful examples (in many cases any examples at all). It rarely tells you why you might want to use any feature. Marking your place, underlining key points, jotting notes in the margins, or reading about QuickBooks while sitting in the sun are out of the question.

The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied QuickBooks 2005. It focuses on the Windows version of QuickBooks, though nearly all the features work the same or similarly on a Mac.

Note

Although each version of QuickBooks introduces new features and enhancements, you can still use this book if you're keeping your company books with earlier versions of QuickBooks. Of course, the older your version of the program, the more discrepancies you'll run across.

In this book's pages, you'll find step-by-step ...