QuickBooks® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Populating QuickBooks Lists

In This Chapter

• Adding items to the Item list

• Adding employees to the Employee list

• Adding new customers and jobs

• Adding new vendors

• Understanding and using the other lists

• Dealing with the chart of accounts list

The EasyStep Interview (which I discuss at some length in Chapter 2) doesn't actually get QuickBooks completely ready to use. You also need to enter the names of all your products, employees, customers, and vendors (and a handful of other items) into lists. In this chapter, I describe how you create and work with these lists. I also describe how you clean up some of the accounting messiness created when you enter information into these lists.

The Magic and Mystery of Items

The first QuickBooks list you need to set up is the Item list — the list of stuff you buy and sell. Before you start adding to your Item list, however, I need to tell you that QuickBooks isn't very smart about its view of what you buy and sell. It thinks that anything you stick on a sales invoice or a purchase order is something you're selling.

If you sell colorful coffee mugs, for example, you probably figure (and correctly so) that you need to add descriptions of each of these items to the Item list. However, if you add freight charges to an invoice, QuickBooks thinks that you're adding another mug. And if you add sales tax to an invoice, well, guess what? QuickBooks again thinks that you're adding another mug.

This wacky definition of items is confusing at first. But just ...