QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Should You Get Your Accountant’s Help?

So should you get help from your accountant? Oh, shoot, I don’t know. If you follow my directions carefully (both in this chapter and the next), and your business financial affairs aren’t wildly complex, I think you can probably figure out all this stuff on your own.

However, having said that, I suggest that you at least think about getting your accountant’s help at this juncture. Your accountant can do a much better job of giving you advice that may be specific to your situation. In many cases, your accountant can give you beginning trial balance amounts that agree with your tax returns. The accountant probably knows your business and can keep you from making a terrible mess of things, just in case you don’t follow my directions carefully.

Just so you know: One of the things that I (as a CPA) do for my clients is help them set up QuickBooks. Because I do this, I can give you a couple of pieces of useful information about getting a CPA’s help in setting up. First, your CPA (assuming that he or she already knows QuickBooks) should be able to help you through the setup process in an hour or two, so your CPA can do it (or help you do it) much faster than you can on your own. Second, an hour or so of tutoring from your CPA should mean that you get enough help to record all your usual transactions.

With just this help, you can find out how to pay your bills, how to invoice customers exactly the way you want, and how to produce reports. I used to ...