QuickBooks® 2010 For Dummies®

Introduction

Running or working in a small business is one of the coolest things a person can do. Really. I mean it. Sure, sometimes the environment is dangerous — kind of like the Old West — but it's also an environment in which you have the opportunity to make tons of money. And it's also an environment in which you can build a company or a job that fits you. In comparison, many brothers and sisters working in big-company corporate America are furiously trying to fit their round pegs into painfully square holes. Yuck.

You're wondering, of course, what any of this has to do with this book or with QuickBooks. Quite a lot, actually. The whole purpose of this book is to make it easier for you to run or work in a small business by using QuickBooks.

About QuickBooks

Let me start off with a minor but useful point: QuickBooks comes in several different flavors, including QuickBooks Basic, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Premier: Accountants Edition, and QuickBooks Enterprise.

This book, however, talks about QuickBooks Premier Edition.

Does this mean that I somehow leave you adrift if you have one of the other flavors? No way. I wouldn't do that to you. QuickBooks Premier is a superset of QuickBooks Simple Start and QuickBooks Pro, and is identical in most areas to QuickBooks Enterprise. By describing how you use QuickBooks Premier, I also tell you how to use the other flavors of QuickBooks.

What's more, for the readers of this book, there's no discernible difference between QuickBooks ...