About This Book

This book isn’t meant to be read from cover to cover, like some Stieg Larsson page-turner. Instead, it’s organized into tiny, no-sweat descriptions of how you do the things you need to do. If you’re the sort of person who just doesn’t feel right not reading a book from cover to cover, you can (of course) go ahead and read this thing from front to back. You can start reading Chapter 1 and continue all the way to the end (which means through Chapter 21 and the appendixes).

tip.eps I don’t think this from-start-to-finish approach is bad because I tell you a bunch of stuff (tips and tricks, for example) along the way. I tried to write the book in such a way that the experience isn’t as rough as you might think, and I really do think you get good value from your reading.

But you also can use this book the way you’d use an encyclopedia. If you want to know about a subject, you can look it up in the Table of Contents or the index; then you can flip to the correct chapter or page and read as much as you need or enjoy. No muss, no fuss.

I should, however, mention one thing: Accounting software programs require you to do a certain amount of preparation before you can use them to get real work done. If you haven’t started to use QuickBooks yet, I recommend that you read through the first few chapters of this book to find out what you need to do first.

Hey. There’s something else I ...

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