How To Setup Preferences in QuickBooks Pro 2017 Part 1
During this QuickBooks Pro 2017 tutorial video, we will go through the preferences that you can modify to make it easier for you to work with QuickBooks. Among the options we will look into are accounting, bills, general, items and inventory, jobs and estimates, payrolls and employees, reminders, reports and graphs.
Hey. Welcome back. This is module 3 where we’re going to talk about customizing the QuickBooks environment. In section 1 we’re going to actually go through the preferences in QuickBooks. Now I’m going to go through and just show you a lot of the ones that are available but keep in mind there’s so many that I couldn’t possibly cover them all. And you may want to take some time after you start using QuickBooks for a while to go back into this preferences and see if there’s some that you may want to adjust just to make it a little easier when you’re working with QuickBooks.
The way you’re going to access the preferences is go up to menu and click on Edit and you’ll see it at the bottom there. The way this window is set up, you’ll see the different categories of options on the left and generally it’s on the General Option when you first come in. Notice that you have two tabs. You have My Preferences and the Company Preferences tab. So make sure you click on each when you’re looking through your preferences. I’m going to start with the top option, Accounting on the left, and just work our way down here just so you can see what’s available.
Notice there’s no options under the My Preferences so I’m going to click on Company Preferences and there’s a few here that you’ll want to be aware of.
The first one is Use Account Numbers. You can see it’s currently off. Now I want to show you what this means. I’m going to cancel Preferences for just a moment. We’re going to be talking a little bit later about the chart of accounts but I want to show you currently what it looks like.
This is what it looks like right now. You can see that this list is very short so we’ll obviously be expanding the list. But what I want you to notice right now is that if you look at the types of accounts over here that they’re alphabetical per type. That means if you’re looking at, for example, all these expense accounts and you look over at these they’re alphabetical per expense account.
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If you had the general ledger numbers turned on they would look like this. So I’ll just go back to Preferences and I’ll go into the Accounting option on the left and I’m going to choose Use Account Numbers from the Company Preferences tab. And when I click OK I want you to notice now that we have general ledger numbers. They’re just an option. You’ll find accountants use them, if you’re really into bookkeeping you’ll probably end up using them but it’s not something you have to use. Some people would just rather see them by category and then look at them that way.
I’m going to go back to our Preferences now. Another one here that you may want to consider is Use the Class Tracking for Transactions. Let me explain what this means. Right now you’re going to be able to run reports based on the entire company. For example, you might run what’s called a Profit and Loss to see if the company made or lost business. However you might also want to break your company file down into smaller sections. Maybe you have departments or maybe you have different locations for the business.
Then you can actually use those different lists you set up as classes. So you could have a list of locations or a list of departments. And every transaction that you create will have an extra field where you can pick which one of those items that particular transaction would go to. That way you can run reports based just on those classes.
If you’re using the online version just know that it has the class option plus an additional option called Locations so you can even break it down further.
Another option I just want you to be aware of is down here where it says Closing Date. In real life accounting the books are closed at the end of the month and then they’re closed at the end of the year. Now here’s what that means. Let’s say I close the books at the end of the year. I’m working in QuickBooks and I see a transaction I want to make in that closed period, meaning before I closed the books. I can’t just change that option but I can make an offsetting entry in the current period. And that’s the correct way that bookkeeping should be done.
QuickBooks does not make you close your books. It doesn’t even ask you. You have to know that the option is here and you have to go in and set the option. What’ll happen is when you click Set Date or Password here it asks you a date through which you want to close the books, generally like I said it’s the end of the month or at least at the end of the year. And then also a password. And what will happen is if you try to make a change in that closed period it will pop up and say You’ve closed the books through a certain date. Would you still like to make those changes? And if you know the password you would be able to do that. That’s what that is. So let me go ahead and cancel out of that.
I’m going to go down the list here. Bills is the next one. We’ll be talking about bills in a later module but I just wanted you to know there’s a few preferences for bills that you can set up. Like if you want it to automatically apply credits that you’ve entered or if you want it to set bills to be automatically due ten days after receipt.
Now let me go down the list here. I’ll go all the way down to General and I’m going to click on My Preferences. So there’s a few here that you’ll definitely want to use.
This first one, Pressing Enter moves between the fields. You definitely want to turn that one on. What’ll happen is if this is not on you’ll be working in QuickBooks and let’s say you’re in a transaction like an invoice, for example. You’ll be working away and you’ll hit the Enter key thinking you’re moving to the next field but actually what you’re doing is you’re saving and closing that transaction. So if you turn this on you can use Tab or Enter to move between the fields.
A lot of these are generic things like do you want to beep when recording a transaction, show little tool tips, things like that.
This one here you may want to consider as well. Automatically recall last transaction for this name. This means that let’s say you enter a check, as an example, and let’s say it’s your electric bill and you filled out the whole check. The next time you actually put in Pay to the Order of your power company don’t you want it to pull in all the information from the last time to save you a lot of typing, keep your data consistent, things like that? It really, really, really will be very beneficial for you to turn this on and then you can just change the few things that need to be changed on that transaction before you save it.
The other thing is you probably want to use today’s date as default. Everything will have today’s date unless you change it. If not it’s going to have the last entered date and that becomes a pain to have to change the date every time.
Alright let’s move on down the list here. Items in inventory. And by the way some of these when you make a change it will pop up and ask you if you want to save just like this. So you would say Yes.
Now you’ll notice there’s options under My Preferences so I’m going to the Company Preferences. Remember in the EasyStep Interview one of the questions it asks was Would you like to use the inventory feature? If you had said no none of these would be checked and you wouldn’t have options on your Home screen for it. So here’s where you actually turn those options one which will turn on those options on the Home screen. And also if you wanted to set up what they call a unit of measurement which we’ll talk about in another module, but that’s basically if you want to sell something by the foot or by the yard, by the case, that type of thing you could do more.
Alright the next one down is Jobs and Estimates. Again I’m on the Company Preferences tab and you’ll see there’s several things here that might be of interest to you. If you work a lot with jobs you have the ability to use different wording for these options. So it could be the Closed job here. You might have a different terminology for that. Or Awarded, you might have different terminology. You can change that to whatever you want it to be.
Estimates, that was one of the things it asked us in the EasyStep Interview. Do you want to create estimates? Here’s where you say yes or no. And also that Progress Invoicing we mentioned as well. You want to turn that on and off. Remember if you do create estimates most of the time you do want progress invoicing.
Let’s see. Let’s go down the list here. Payroll. One of the questions it asked us in the EasyStep Interview was Do you want to turn on the Payroll feature and this is where you turn it on. So if I click on Full Payroll, for example, I will see all the options available for setting up payroll when I go back to my Home screen. Notice some of your choices here. If you want to set preferences for paystubs, for worker’s comp, sick and vacation you could do that here as well.
Reminders is the next one down on the list. Let me go ahead and say Yes there. Sometimes you also have to close all the windows to change a preference, that’s the only choice you have so you just click OK. And you can see back here, we’ll open things back up in a little bit.
Reminders. There are certain things that QuickBooks will remind you to do. And you can see there’s checks to print, you have overdue invoices, if you have inventory to reorder, bills to pay. You can kind of see the list here. You can turn on the reminders that you want it to remind you of and you can say Show me the list or Don’t remind me.
Show me the list means that when you open your QuickBooks file for the first time you’re going to have a window that says You have 6 checks to print. If you show the list it will actually show every one of the checks that needs to be printed versus if you leave it on Show Summary then it’s going to say You have 6 checks and they total a certain amount of money. So it’s up to you if you want to see a summary or a list of each individual item you’ve asked it to remind you of. And like I said, you can say Don’t remind me.
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Something else you might want to do is if you’re going to have it remind you of something you might have it remind you a few days ahead of time. You can see down this list that if you have paychecks to print and you like to print them a few days early have it remind you before the due date two or three days and that way you’ll be reminded to do that.
One more down here is Reports and Graphs. The big thing I want you to know here is that when I show you how reports run in a later module you’ll see that they automatically run on accrual basis. And basically that means the reports will show any income as soon as you create an invoice, whether it’s been paid or not. Same thing with expenses. If you enter a bill it will show you that you’ve already spent that money when that may or may not be the case. So you have the ability to run your reports on a cash basis if you’d like.
There’s also some options here with reports is how to show the items or if you want to see the age and things like that. We’re going to get more into that when we talk about reports in a later module.
What I want to do now is this was part 1 of section 1 so let’s go ahead and go over to part 2 and I’ll continue talking about some of these other preferences.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
