QuickBooks 2006: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, and Petty Cash

You’ve opened your mail, plucked out your customers’ payments, and deposited them in your bank account (see Chapter 9). Your bills and customer refund checks are paid (see Chapter 10). Now you can sit back and relax knowing that most of the transactions in your bank and credit card accounts are accounted for. What’s left?

Some stray transactions might pop up—an insurance claim check to deposit, restocking your petty cash drawer, or a fee from your bank for a customer’s bounced check, to name a few. Plus, running a business typically means that money moves between accounts—from interest-bearing accounts to checking accounts or from merchant credit card accounts to your savings. If you come across a financial transaction in business, you can enter it in QuickBooks, whether you prefer the guidance of dialog boxes or the speed of an account register window.

Reconciling your accounts to your bank statements is another key process you don’t want to miss. You and your bank both can make mistakes, and reconciling your accounts is the best way to catch these discrepancies. Once the bane of bookkeepers, reconciling is practically automatic now that you can download transactions electronically and let QuickBooks handle the math.

In this chapter, the section on reconciling is the only must-read. If you want to learn the fastest way to enter any type of bank account transaction, don’t skip the next section, “Entering Transactions in an Account ...