QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Hiding and Deleting Accounts

If you create an account by mistake, you can delete it. However, because QuickBooks drops your financial transactions into account buckets and you don’t want to throw away historical information, you’ll usually want to hide accounts that you don’t use anymore instead of deleting them. The records of past transactions are important, whether you want to review the amount of business you’ve received from a customer or the IRS is asking unsettling questions. For example, you wouldn’t delete your Nutrition Service income account just because you’ve discontinued your nutrition consulting service to focus on selling your new book, The See Food Diet. The income you earned from that service in the past needs to stay in your records.

Hiding Accounts

Hiding accounts doesn’t mean withholding key financial info from prying eyes. When you hide an account in QuickBooks, the account continues to hold your historical transactions, but it doesn’t appear in account lists, so you can’t choose it by mistake with a misplaced mouse click.

Hiding and reactivating accounts (Figure 3-5) also comes in handy when you use QuickBooks’ predefined charts of accounts, explained on Beginning to Use QuickBooks. If QuickBooks overwhelms you with accounts you don’t think you need, hide those accounts for the time being. That way, if you find yourself saying, “Gosh, I wish I had an account for the accumulated depreciation of vehicles,” the solution might be as simple as reactivating a hidden ...