QuickBooks Pro is easy to learn and use. You can add features as your company grows like inventory or sales tax. You can customize your business invoices, estimates and statements. You can even add your company logo to the forms and print them yourself. You can track your checks that you write, who owes you money and what you owe, track inventory and Pos and track payroll expenses, liabilities, print checks, payroll reports. You can print out postage, create a web site and accept credit card payments. Also in Pro it has integrated contact information from ACT, Outlook and your PDA with Intellisync. You can integrate with MS Word to send out letters on business letterhead. You can use MS Excel to receive reports and formulas and manipulate your data without re-entering data. Pro also lets you prepare customizable estimates for bidding projects, tracks your time, automate job costing and invoice clients by milestones by date or completed phases.

The best way to start using an accounting package like this is to asks some questions of how you will be using it in your business and what you expect to do. As you follow the manual along you will actually be able to setup a tutorial and dummy company to practice with before you actually start using it. This way you can see what you need and don't need of the program and how things work before you make other mistakes. Running a business is hard enough, don't make your life miserable by not using all the right tools of this program.

• Chapters 1 & 2 of the manual talk about business and business practices.
• Chapter 3 walks you through setting your company with QuickBooks.
• Chapter 4 walks you through organzing your data effectively and how much detail you need to use.
• Chapter 5 explains how to protect your data with passwords and backing up your data.
• Chapter 6 explains how to use QuickBooks Pro on a network and multi-users.
• Chapter 7 walks you through establishing a website, creating timely reminders and notes, creating checks and business forms with your company logo.
• Chapter 8 explains about choosing the right bank, benefits of online banking, handling bank transactions on a day-to-day , month-to-month and as-needed basis.
• Chapter 9 explains what Items you sell and purchase -- your services, products and information on sales tax and reports.
• Chapter 10 tells you how to track customers and the work you do for them with reports and how bill them.
• Chapter 11 explains how to track the money your business brings in from customers.
• Chapter 12 explains how to enter vendors and track vendor information.
• Chapter 13 walks you through inventory setup and tracking.
• Chapter 14 explains how to tracks and paying expenses, setup online payments, using A/P to track and pay expenses, and how to handle business and personal funds.
• Chapter 15 talks about sales tax. It helps you setup sales tax rates, collections, nontaxable sales, speical tax situations, keeping track of how much to pay and reports with breakdowns needed to show all sales taxes.
• Chapter 16 talks about income tax information for IRS all the forms and things you need to collect and file your income tax and your reporting.
• Chapter 17 is on time tracking so that you know how long you worked on a job and how much you need to bill your clients. It has several different methods to tracking and using the stopwatch and timer.
• Chapter 18 explains Payroll. It explains the service that QuickBooks has on payroll services you an subscribe to for a fee each month. It may be worth while to use this service is you have lots of employees or if you have don't have the time to spend on all this extra work besides doing your regluar work. Payroll is very time consuming and is definitely something you don't want to neglect in your business.
• Chapter 19 walks you through setup reports and graphs on your business and how to pull the information in from Quickbooks to Excel.
• Chapter 20 explains how to keep on target with a budget and how to graph your budget.
• Chapter 21 talks about periodical tasks to do weekly, monthly, daily, quarterly, and annually. It also talks about condensing your data file and how that affects your reports.
• Chapter 22 talks about updating your QuickBooks software and to get maintenance releases.
• Chapter 23 walks you through synchronzing QuickBooks with ACT or Outlook and putting all your data in reports and working with the information.
• Chapter 24 Advises you on working with your Accountant or advior.
• Chapter 25 talks about importing and exporting data and transferring files.
• Appendix A is on Troubleshooting problems
• Appendix B is on Intuit services, supplies, and technical support.

There are over 500 pages to this manual. This is why I broke down the chapters. If you make up your tutorial and follow each chapter you will have a very good model to use and setup your own business. It is will also help those who work with you on the program to understand different aspects of the business. If you are sole owner and do all your own work, then the payroll services will work well if you have serveral field employees. It will ease up your work and let you do the things that are important. The payroll services does cost. It can vary from $6.00 a month to $25.00 depending on how much you need them to handle.

Overall, QuickBooks Pro is the way to go. Of all the flavors of this program the Pro version allows for the most flexibility and lets you use it in more ways with different businesses. It is the program I use even for a small consulting business. It allows me to track services and all my time as well as to see where the taxes are going and the products. QuickBooks Pro 2000 sells for $220.00 retail or $150.00 for the upgrade. QuickBooks 2000 sells for $120.00 and the upgrade is $70.00. These prices are from Intuit direct. If you watch for sales and shop around you can probably find it on sale.

QuickBooks Pro 2000 has become a good product and will continue to the number one small business accounting package for a long time. It is easy to use and easy to learn as I said in the beginning. It lets you setup your business in a very short period of time and gets you working so that your business will run smooth and help you make the money you need or collect the money you need to collect. Your whole inventory can be setup and run with this program. I did not hit a lot of the details as that would take up more space then we have. All I can say is that this is the accounting package you will need for your business. There are other packages on the market, but they will cost you more money and more headaches, espeically if you don't have lots of experience with accounting practices. Keep life easy and simple and you business will run smooth and you won't get as many headaches. Contact or research Quickbooks at: http://www.quickbooks.com for all the information and details.

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