QuickBooks 2016 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 1

Administering QuickBooks

In This Chapter

• Securing your data
• Managing QuickBooks in a multi-user environment
• Enabling audit trails
• Setting up QuickBooks for simultaneous multi-user access
• Managing accounting controls

QuickBooks does something that’s critically important to the success of your business: It collects and supplies financial information. For this reason, you want to have a firm understanding of how you can protect the data that QuickBooks collects and stores, as well as the assets that QuickBooks tracks. This chapter describes all this.

Keeping Your Data Confidential

Accounting data is often confidential information. Your QuickBooks data shows how much money you have in the bank, what you owe creditors, and how much (or how little!) profit your firm produces. Because this information is private, your first concern in administering a QuickBooks accounting system is keeping your data confidential.

You have two complementary methods for keeping your QuickBooks data confidential. The first method for maintaining confidentiality relies on the security features built into Microsoft Windows. The other method relies on QuickBooks’s security features.

Using Windows security

You can use the security provided by Microsoft Windows to restrict access to a file — either a program file or a data file — to specific users. This means that you can use Windows-level security to say who can and can’t use the QuickBooks program or access the QuickBooks data file.

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