Setting the Accounting Preferences

The My Preferences tab of the Accounting Preferences set provides a single option: You can tell QuickBooks you want it to autofill information when recording a general journal entry.

Don't get irritated with the lack of personalization, however. This almost total lack of individually personalized preferences makes sense, if you think about it. Accounting for a business needs to work the same way for Jane as it does for Joe and for Susan.

However, you do have the option to set several company preferences for accounting. This makes sense, again, if you think about it. Different companies run their accounting systems in different ways. Figure 1 shows the Company Preferences tab for the Accounting Preferences set.

Figure 1: The Company Preferences tab of the Accounting Preferences dialog box

Using Account Numbers

By default, QuickBooks lets you use names to identify accounts on the Chart of Accounts or in the accounts list. For example, the account that you use to track wages expense may be known as "wages." However, you can select the Use Account Numbers check box to tell QuickBooks that you want to use account numbers rather than account names for identifying accounts. Larger businesses and businesses with very lengthy lists of accounts often use account numbers. You can more easily control both the ordering of accounts on a financial statement and the insertion of new accounts into the Chart of Accounts if you're using numbers.

The Show Lowest Subaccount Only check box lets you tell QuickBooks that it should display the lowest subaccount rather than the higher parent account on financial statements. QuickBooks allows you to create subaccounts, which are accounts within accounts. You can also create sub-subaccounts, which are accounts within subaccounts. You use subaccounts to more finely track assets, liabilities, equity amounts, revenues, and expenses.

General Accounting Options

The Company Preferences tab provides the following five general accounting check boxes as well as closing date settings. (These check boxes are probably self-explanatory to anybody who has done a bit of accounting with QuickBooks, but for new QuickBooks users, I provide a brief description of what each one does.)

• Use Account Numbers: The Use Account Numbers check box, if selected, enables you to enter an account number for a transaction. The associated check box, Show Lowest Subaccount Only, tells QuickBooks to display only the name and account number of a subaccount (if you're using one) instead of the full heritage of the account. If you use a lot of levels of subaccounts, this option can really clean up views, making it easier to tell what account you're looking at.

• Require Accounts: The Require Accounts check box, if selected, tells QuickBooks that you must specify an account for a transaction. This makes sense. If you aren't using account numbers to track the amounts that flow into and out of the business, you aren't really doing accounting. It would never make sense, in my humble opinion, to deselect the Require Accounts check box.

• Use Class Tracking: The Use Class Tracking check box lets you tell QuickBooks that you want to use not only accounts to track your financial information but also classes. Classes let you split account level information in another way. This sounds complicated, but it's really quite simple. The account list, for example, lets you track revenue and expenses by categories of revenue and expense. You may track expenses by using categories such as wages, rent, and supplies. Classes, therefore, provide you with a way to track this information in another dimension. For example, you can split wages expense into those wages spent for two different locations of your business. A restaurateur with two restaurants may want to do this.

• Automatically Assign General Journal Entry Number: This check box tells QuickBooks to assign numbers to the general journal entries that you enter by using the Make Journal Entry command. You want to leave this check box selected. General journal entries, by the way, are typically entered by your CPA or your professional on-staff accountant.

• Closing Date settings: The Closing Date box lets you identify a date before which your QuickBooks data file can't be changed. In other words, if you set the closing date to December 31, 2008, you're telling QuickBooks that you don't want any changes made to the QuickBooks data file before this date. This means that someone can't modify a transaction that's dated before your closing date without getting a scary warning message. It also means that someone can't enter a transaction by using a date before this closing date. You can also click the Set Password button to display a dialog box that lets you create a password, which is required if someone wants to add an old transaction or modify an old transaction.

Tip

Past versions of QuickBooks also let you turn on and off an audit trail feature by using the Company Preferences tab of the Accounting Preferences. However, since 2007, QuickBooks provides an always-on audit trail, so you don't see an Audit Trail check box accounting preference any more. An audit trail, by the way, simply keeps a list of who makes which changes to transactions. Accountants, predictably, love audit trails. Audit trails enable someone, such as your CPA, to come in after the fact and figure out why an account balance is what it is.

Accounting for Fixed Assets

Fixed assets are those items that you can't immediately count as an expense when purchased. Fixed assets include such things as vehicles, furniture, equipment, and so forth. Fixed assets are tricky for two reasons: Typically, you must depreciate fixed assets (more on that in a bit), and you need to record the disposal of the fixed asset at some point in the future—for either a gain or a loss.

Purchasing a Fixed Asset

Accounting for the purchase of a fixed asset is pretty straightforward. Table 1 shows how a fixed asset purchase typically looks:

Account	Debit	Credit
Delivery truck	12,000
Cash		12,000

Table 1 - Journal Entry 10: Recording Fixed Asset Purchase

If you purchase a $12,000 delivery truck with cash, for example, the journal entry that you use to record this purchase debits delivery truck for $12,000 and credits cash for $12,000.

Within QuickBooks, this journal entry actually gets made when you write the check to pay for the purchase. The one thing that you absolutely must do is set up a fixed asset account for the specific asset. In other words, you don't want to debit a general catch-all fixed asset account. If you buy a delivery truck, you set up a fixed asset account for that specific delivery truck. If you buy a computer system, you set up a fixed asset account for that particular computer system. In fact, the general rule is that any fixed asset that you buy individually or dispose of later individually needs its own asset account. The reason for this is that if you don't have individual fixed asset accounts, later on the job of calculating gains and losses on the disposal of the fixed asset turns into a Herculean task.

Dealing with Depreciation

Depreciation is an accounting gimmick to recognize the expense of using a fixed asset over a period of time. Although you may not be all that familiar with the mechanics of depreciation, you probably do understand the logic. For the sake of illustration, suppose that you bought a $12,000 delivery truck. Suppose also that because you know how to do your own repair work and take excellent care of your vehicles, you will be able to use this truck for ten years. Further suppose that at the end of the ten years, the truck will probably have a $2,000 salvage value (your best guess). Depreciation says that if you buy something for $12,000 and that you can later sell it for $2,000, that decrease in value can be apportioned to expense. In this case, the $10,000 decrease in value is counted as expense over ten years. That expense is called depreciation.

Accountants and tax accounting laws use a variety of methods to apportion the cost of using an asset over the years in which it's used. A common method is called straight-line depreciation. Straight-line depreciation divides the decrease in value by the number of years that an asset is used. An asset that decreases $10,000 over ten years, for example, produces $1,000 a year of depreciation expense.

To record depreciation, you use a journal entry like the one shown in Table 2.

Account	Debit	Credit
Depreciation expense	1,000
Acc.dep.—delivery truck		1,000

Table 2 - Journal Entry 11: Recording Fixed Asset Depreciation

Journal Entry 11 debits an expense account called "depreciation expense" for $1,000. Journal Entry 11 also credits a contra-asset account called "accumulated depreciation—delivery truck" for $1,000. (By convention, because the phrase "accumulated depreciation" is so long, accountants and bookkeepers usually abbreviate it as "acc. dep.") Note also that you need specific individual accumulated depreciation contra-asset accounts for each specific individual fixed asset account. You don't want to lump all your accumulated depreciation together into a single catch-all account. That way lies madness and ruin.

Disposing of a Fixed Asset

The final wrinkle of fixed asset accounting concerns disposal of a fixed asset for a gain or for a loss. When you ultimately sell a fixed asset or trade it in or discard it because it's now junk, you record any gain or loss on the disposal of the asset. You also remove the fixed asset from your accounting records.

Choosing a depreciation method

Straight-line depreciation, which I illustrate here, makes for a good example in a book. It's easy to understand and to illustrate. However, most accountants and business owners use more complicated depreciation methods for a variety of reasons. One of the most important reasons is that tax accounting laws generally allow for depreciation methods that accelerate tax deductions.

You can figure out the annual depreciation according to one of these tax-based depreciation methods with your tax advisor's help. Different rules apply to different types of assets. The rules that you use for a particular asset depend on when you originally purchase the asset. I recommend that you use the same asset depreciation method in QuickBooks that you use for your tax accounting. Depreciation is complicated enough as it is. You don't want to be using one method of depreciation within QuickBooks for your own internal financial management and another method for your tax returns.

While I'm on the subject of depreciation, I should also mention that many small firms havethe option of using something called a Section 179 election. (Section 179 is a chunk of law inthe Internal Revenue Code.) A Section 179 election allows many businesses to immedi-ately depreciate 100%of the cost of many of their fixed assets at the time of purchase. Despite the fact that a Section 179 election means that you can immediately write off thepurchase of, for example, a $24,000 vehicle at the time of purchase, you still want to treatfixed assets expensed via a Section 179 election the way I describe here. The difference isthat you'll immediately show the asset as fully depreciated —which means depreciated down to its salvage value or down to zero.

To show you how this works, consider again the example of the $12,000 delivery truck. Suppose that you've owned and operated this truck for two years. Over that time, you've depreciated $2,000 of the truck's original purchase price. Further suppose that you're going to sell the truck for $11,000 in cash. Table 3 shows the journal entry that you would make in order to record this disposal.

Account	Debit	Credit
Delivery truck		12,000
Cash	11,000
Acc. dep.—delivery truck	2,000
Gain on sale		1,000

Table 3 - Journal Entry 12: Recording Fixed Asset Sale for Gain

The first component of Journal Entry 12 shows the $12,000 credit of the delivery truck asset. This makes sense, right? You remove the delivery truck from your fixed asset amounts by crediting the account for the same amount that you originally debited the account when you purchased the asset.

The next component of the journal entry shows the $11,000 debit to cash. This component, again, is pretty straightforward. It shows the cash that you receive by selling the asset.

The third component of the journal entry backs out the accumulated depreciation. If you depreciated the truck $1,000 a year for two years, the accumulated depreciation contra-asset account for the truck should equal $2,000. To remove this accumulated depreciation from your balance sheet, you debit the accumulated depreciation account for $2,000.

The final piece of the disposal journal entry is a plug, a calculated amount. You know the amount and whether that amount is a debit or credit by looking at the other accounts affected. For example, in the case of Journal Entry 12, you know that a $1,000 credit is necessary to balance the journal entry. Debits must equal credits.

Remember

A credit is a gain. A credit is essentially revenue.

If the plug was a debit amount, the disposal produces a loss. This makes sense; a loss is like an expense, and expenses are debits.

If you're confused about the gain component of Journal Entry 12, let me make this observation. Over the two years of use, the business depreciated the truck by $2,000. In other words, the business, through the depreciation expense, said that the truck lost $2,000 of value. If, however, the $12,000 delivery truck is sold two years later for $11,000, the loss in value doesn't equal $2,000. The loss in value equals $1,000. The $1,000 gain, essentially, recaptures the unnecessary, extra depreciation that was incorrectly charged.

Recording Accounts Payable Transactions

Within QuickBooks, you have the option of either working with or without an accounts payable account. If you want to, you can record expenses when you write checks. This means that in order to have a complete list of all your expenses, you must have recorded checks that pay all your expenses. This approach works fine—and, in fact, is the approach that I've always used in my businesses.

QuickBooks also supports a more precise approach of recording expenses. By answering a few questions during the QuickBooks setup process, you can set up an accounts payable account, which is just an account that tracks the amounts that you owe your vendors and other suppliers.

Recording a Bill

When you use an accounts payable account, you enter the bills that you get from vendors when you receive them.

Table 1 shows the way this transaction is recorded. Journal Entry 5 automatically debits office supplies expense for $1,000 and credits accounts payable for $1,000. This is the journal entry that would be recorded by QuickBooks if you purchased $1,000 of office supplies and then entered that bill into the QuickBooks system.

Account	Debit	Credit
Office supplies	1,000
Accounts payable		1,000

Table 1 - Journal Entry 5: Recording a Credit Purchase

Paying a Bill

When you later pay that bill, QuickBooks records Journal Entry 6, shown in Table 2. In Journal Entry 6, QuickBooks debits accounts payable for $1,000 and credits cash for $1,000. The net effect on accounts payable combining both the purchase and the payment is zero. That makes sense, right? The approach shown in Journal Entries 5 and 6 counts the amount that you owe some vendor or supplier as a liability, accounts payable, only while you owe the money.

Account	Debit	Credit
Accounts payable	1,000
Cash		1,000

Table 2 - Journal Entry 6: Recording the Payment to Vendor

When you record Journal Entry 6 in QuickBooks, you must supply the name of the account that gets debited. QuickBooks obviously knows which account to credit—the accounts payable account. However, QuickBooks also has to know the expense or asset account to debit.

QuickBooks does need to know which cash account to credit when you pay an accounts payable amount. You identify this when you write the check to pay the bill.

Some other Accounts Payable Pointers

Let me make a couple of additional points about Journal Entries 5 and 6:

• The accounts payable method is more accurate. The accounts payable method, which is what Journal Entries 5 and 6 show, is the best way to record your bills. The accounts payable method means that you record expenses when the expenses actually occur. As you may have already figured out, the accounts payable method is really the mirror image of the accounts receivable approach. The big benefit of the accounts payable method, as you may intuit, is that it keeps track of the amounts that you owe vendors and suppliers and it recognizes expenses as they occur rather than when you pay them (which may be some time later).

• Not every debit is for an expense. Journal Entry 5 shows the debit going to an office supplies expense account. Many of the accounts payable that you record are amounts owed for expenses. However, not every accounts payable transaction stems from incurring some expense. You may also need to record the purchase of an asset—such as a piece of equipment. In this case, the debit goes not to an expense account but to an asset account. Other than this minor change, however, the transaction works in the same way.

  Tip

  Can you guess how an expense or fixed asset purchase gets recorded if you don't use an accounts payable account? In the case where you paid $1,000 for office supplies, QuickBooks debits office supplies expense for $1,000 and credits cash for $1,000 when you write a $1,000 check. As part of writing the check, you identify which expense account to debit.

  If you're purchasing a $1,000 piece of equipment, the journal entry looks and works in roughly the same way. When you record the purchase, QuickBooks debits the asset account for $1,000 and credits cash for $1,000. Again, this transaction gets recorded when you write the check to pay for the asset.

Special Accounting Problems

Even if you understand the principles of accounting and the basics of double-entry bookkeeping, you still may not have all the information that you need to keep good records. For example, tracking the amounts that customers owe you and the amounts that you owe vendors can be a bit tricky. Inventory can also present challenging record-keeping problems, a fact that's not surprising to you as a retailer. And things like fixed assets—oh, don't even get me started.

For these reasons, this post describes the most common complexities that business owners confront. You don't need to be an accountant or an experienced bookkeeper to understand the material. However, you do need to proceed carefully, take your time, and think a bit about how the material I describe here applies to your specific business situation.

Working with Accounts Receivable

You already know that accounting principles state that sales revenue needs to be recognized when a sale is made. And that the sale is made when a business provides goods or services to a customer.

In other words—and this is really an important point—sales revenue doesn't get recorded when you receive payment from a customer. Sales revenue gets recorded when a customer has a legal obligation to pay you because you have (or your business has) provided the customer with the goods or services.

Recording a Sale

This requirement to record sales revenue at the time that goods or services are provided means that accounting for sales revenue is slightly more complicated than you may have first guessed. The first transaction, for example, the transaction that records a sale, is shown in Table 1.

Account	Debit	Credit
Accounts receivable	1,000
Sales revenue		1,000

Table 1: Journal Entry 1: Recording a Credit Sale

Journal Entry 1 shows how a $1,000 sale may be recorded. The journal entry shows a $1,000 debit to accounts receivable and a $1,000 credit to sales revenue. To record a $1,000 sale—a credit sale—the journal entry needs to show both the $1,000 increase in accounts receivable and the $1,000 increase in sales revenue.

Recording a Payment

When the business receives payment from the customer for the $1,000 receivable, the business records a journal entry like that shown in Table 2.

Account	Debit	Credit
Cash	1,000
Accounts receivable		1,000

Table 2: Journal Entry 2: Recording the Customer PaymentJournal Entry 2 shows a $1,000 debit to cash, which is the $1,000 increase in the cash account that occurs because the customer has just paid you $1,000. Journal Entry 2 also shows a $1,000 credit to accounts receivable. This credit to the accounts receivable asset account reduces the accounts receivable balance.

At the point when you record both Journal Entry 1 and Journal Entry 2, the net effect is a $1,000 debit to cash, (showing that the cash has increased by $1,000) and a $1,000 credit to sales revenue (showing that sales revenue has increased by $1,000). The $1,000 debit to accounts receivable and the $1,000 credit to accounts receivable net to zero.

If you think about this accounts receivable business a bit, you should realize that it makes sense. Although the accounts receivable account includes a $1,000 receivable balance, this just means that the customer owes you $1,000. But when the customer finally pays off the $1,000 bill, you need to zero out that receivable.

QuickBooks, by the way, automatically records Journal Entry 1 and Journal Entry 2 for you. Journal Entry 1 gets recorded whenever you issue or create a customer invoice. Therefore, you don't need to worry about the debits and credits shown in Journal Entry 1 except for one special occasion: When you set up QuickBooks and QuickBooks items (items are things that get included on the invoices), you do specify which account should be credited to track sales revenue. So, although you may not need to worry much about the mechanics of Journal Entry 1, you should understand how this journal entry works so that you can set up QuickBooks correctly.

Journal Entry 2 also gets recorded automatically by QuickBooks. QuickBooks records Journal Entry 2 for you whenever you record a cash payment from a customer. You don't need to worry, then, about the debits and credits necessary for recording customer payments. However, I find that it's helpful to understand how this journal entry works and how QuickBooks records this customer payment transaction.

Estimating Bad Debt Expense

One other important journal entry to understand is shown in Table 3.

Account	Debit	Credit
Bad debt expense	1,00
Allowance for uncollectible A/R		1,00

Table 3: Journal Entry 3: Recording an Allowance for Uncollectible Accounts

Journal Entry 3 records an estimate of the uncollectible portion of accounts receivable. (Businesses that don't want to keep accrual-based accounting statements may not need to worry about Journal Entry 3.) Unfortunately, some of the money you bill customers may be uncollectible. Yet Journal Entry 1 records every dollar that you bill your customers as revenue. Therefore, you need a way to offset, or reduce, some of the sales revenue by the amount that ultimately turns out to be uncollectible.

Journal Entry 3 shows a common way of doing this. Journal Entry 3 debits bad debt expense—which is an expense account that you may use to record uncollectible customer receivables. Journal Entry 3 also credits another account shown as allowance for uncollectible A/R. This allowance account is called a contra-asset account, which means it basically reduces the balance reported on the balance sheet of an asset account. In the case of the allowance for uncollectible A/R accounts, for example, this $100 credit reduces the accounts receivable balance shown on the balance sheet by $100.

Where the bad debt expense shown in Journal Entry 3 appears varies from business to business. Some businesses report the bad debt expense with the other sales revenue, thereby allowing the income statement to show net sales revenue. Other businesses report bad debt expense with the other operating expenses. You should report bad debt expense wherever it makes most sense in terms of managing your business.

Remember

QuickBooks doesn't automatically record the transaction in Journal Entry 3. You record estimates of bad debt expense yourself by using the QuickBooks Make Journal Entries command.

Removing Uncollectible Accounts Receivable

If you do set up an allowance for uncollectible accounts, you also need to periodically remove the uncollectible accounts from both the accounts receivable balance and the allowance for uncollectible accounts. You don't want to do this while any chance exists to collect on the accounts. But at some point, obviously, you may as well clean out the bad receivables from your records. It makes no sense, for example, to have uncollectible receivables from 17 years ago still appearing on your balance sheet. Table 4 illustrates how to clean out bad receivables.

Account	Debit	Credit
Allowance for uncollectible	1,00
Accounts receivable		1,00

Table 4: Journal Entry 4: Writing Off an Uncollectible Receivable

This journal entry debits the allowance from the uncollectible A/R account for $100. The journal entry also credits the accounts receivable account for $100. In combination, these two entries zero out the allowance for the uncollectible A/R account and remove the uncollectible amount from the accounts receivable account.

Tip

Writing off an actual, specific uncollectible receivable for invoice should be done on a case-by-case basis. This is what Journal Entry 4 shows.

None of these entries is particularly tricky as long as you understand the logic—something I hope I've illuminated for you in this discussion. If you do have trouble with these journal entries or with recording the economic events that they attempt to summarize, you may want to consult your CPA. Most likely, you would record these same transactions (of course, with different customers and amounts) many, many times over the year. If you can get a bit of help or a template that shows you how to record these transactions, you should be able to record them yourself without any outside help.

Tip

To write off an uncollectible account receivable, you record a credit memo and then apply the credit memo to the uncollectible account. The item shown on your credit memo should cause the allowance for uncollectible accounts to be debited.

Double-Entry Bookkeeping

In truth, financial statements are pretty straightforward. An income statement, for example, shows a firm's revenues, expenses, and profits. A balance sheet itemizes a firm's assets, liabilities, and owner's equity. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, preparing traditional financial statements is more complicated and tedious. The work of preparing financial statements — called accounting or bookkeeping — requires either a whole bunch of fiddle-faddling with numbers or learning how to use double-entry bookkeeping.

I start by describing the fiddle-faddle method. This isn't because I think you should use that method. In fact, I assume that you eventually want to use QuickBooks for your accounting and, by extension, for double-entry bookkeeping. However, if you understand the fiddle-faddle method, you'll clearly see why double-entry bookkeeping is so much better.

After I describe the fiddle-faddle method, I walk you through the steps to using and understanding double-entry bookkeeping. After you see all the anguish and grief that the fiddle-faddle method causes, you should have no trouble appreciating why double-entry bookkeeping works so much better. And I hope you'll also commit to the 30 or 40 minutes necessary to learn the basics of double-entry bookkeeping.

The Fiddle-Faddle Method of Accounting

Most small businesses — or at least those small businesses where the owners aren't already trained in accounting — have used the fiddle-faddle method. For example, take a peek at the financial statements shown in Table 1 and 2. Table 2 shows the balance sheet at the start of the first day of operation.

Table 2-1: A Simple Income Statement for the Hot Dog Stand

Sales revenue	$13,000
Less: Cost of goods sold	3,000
Gross margin	$10,000
Operating expenses
Rent	$1,000
Wages	4,000
Supplies	1,000
Total operating expenses	6,000
Operating profit	$4,000

Table 2-2: A Simple Balance Sheet for the Hot Dog Stand

Assets
Cash	$1,000
Inventory	3,000
Total assets	$4,000
Liabilities
Accounts payable	$2,000
Loan payable	1,000
Owner's equity
S. Nelson, capital	1,000
Total liabilities and owner's equity	$4,000

With the fiddle-faddle method of accounting, you individually calculate each number shown in the financial statement. For example, the sales revenue figure shown in Table 1 equals $13,000. The fiddle-faddle method of accounting requires you to somehow come up with this sales revenue number manually. You may be able to come up with this number by remembering each of the sales that you made over the day. Or, if you prepare invoices or sales receipts, you may be able to come up with this number by adding all the individual sales. If you have a cash register, you may also be able to come up with this number by looking at the cash register tape.

Other revenue and expense numbers get calculated in the same crude manner. For example, the $1,000 of rent expense gets calculated by either remembering what amount you paid for rent, or by looking in your checkbook register and finding the check that you wrote for rent.

The balance sheet values get produced in roughly the same way. You can deduce the cash balance of $1,000, for example, by looking at the checkbook or, in a worst case scenario, the bank statement. You can deduce the inventory balance of $3,000 by adding the individual inventory item values. You can calculate the liability and owner's equity amounts in similar fashion.

Some of the values shown in an income statement or on a balance sheet get plugged — meaning that they're calculated using other numbers from the financial statement. For example, you don't look up the profit amount in any particular place; instead, you calculate profit by subtracting expenses from revenue. You can also, of course, calculate balance sheet values, such as total assets, owner's equity, and total liability of owner's equity.

Okay, I admit it: The fiddle-faddle method of accounting works reasonably well for a very small business as long as you have a good checkbook. So, for a very small business, you may be able to get away with this crude, piecemeal approach to accounting.

But unfortunately, the fiddle-faddle method suffers from three horrible weaknesses for a firm that doesn't have super-simple finances:

• It's not systematic enough to be automated. Now, admittedly, you may not care that the fiddle-faddle approach isn't systematic enough for automation. But this point is an important one. A systematic approach like double-entry bookkeeping can be automated, as QuickBooks does. This automation means that the task of preparing financial statements requires — oh, I don't know — maybe five mouse clicks. Because the fiddle-faddle approach can't be automated, every time you want to produce financial statements, you or some poor co-worker goes to an enormous amount of work to collect the numbers and all the raw data necessary to produce information like that shown in Table 2 and Table 2. In reality, of course, with more complicated financial statements, someone does much, much more work.

• It's very easy to lose details. This sounds abstract, but let me give you a good, concrete example. If you look at Table 1, you see that the hot dog stand business incurs only three operating expenses: rent, wages, and supplies. If you know the operating expense categories that the business incurs, it's fairly easy to look through the check register and find the check or checks that pay rent, for example. You can use a similar approach with the wages and supplies expenses. However, what if you also have an advertising expense category or a business license expense, or some other easy-to-forget category? If you forget a category, you miss expenses. For example, if you forget that you spent money advertising and, thereby, forget to tally your advertising expenses, that whole category of operating expense gets omitted from your income statement.

• It doesn't allow rigorous error checking. This business about error checking seems, perhaps, nit-picky. However, error checking is important with accounting and bookkeeping systems. With all the numbers and transactions floating around, errors easily creep into the system. Let me give you an example of the sort of error checking an accounting system can (and should) perform. Take a look at the example of the sales transaction. If you sell an item for $1,000, you can actually check that amount by comparing it to your record of what the customer paid. This makes sense, right? If you sell me an item for $1,000, you actually should be able to compare that $1,000 sale to the amount of cash that I pay you. A $1,000 sale to me should correspond to a $1,000 cash payment from me. The fiddle-faddle method can't make these comparisons. However, double-entry bookkeeping can.

You see where I'm at now, right? I've admitted that you can construct financial statements using the fiddle-faddle method. But I hope I've also convinced you that the fiddle-faddle method suffers from some really debilitating weaknesses. I'm talking about something as important as how you can best manage the financial affairs of your business. These weaknesses indicate that you need a better tool. Specifically, you need double-entry bookkeeping, which I discuss next.

The Philosophy of Accounting

Maybe the phrase philosophy of accounting is too strong, but accounting does rest on a rather small set of fundamental assumptions and principles. People often refer to these fundamentals as generally accepted accounting principles.

I want to quickly summarize what these principles are. I find — and I bet you'll find the same thing — that understanding the principles gives context and makes accounting practices more understandable. With this in mind, let me go through the half dozen or so key accounting principles and assumptions.

These are the basic accounting principles that underlie business accounting. It's no exaggeration to say that they permeate almost everything related to business accounting.

Revenue Principle

The revenue principle, also known as the realization principle, states that revenue is earned when the sale is made. The sale is made, typically, when goods or services are provided. A key component of the revenue principle, when it comes to the sale of goods, is that revenue is earned when legal ownership of the goods passes from seller to buyer.

Note that revenue isn't earned when you collect cash for something. It turns out, perhaps counterintuitively, that counting revenue when cash is collected doesn't give the business owner a good idea of what sales really are. Some customers may pay deposits early, before actually receiving the goods or services. Often customers want to use trade credit, paying a firm at some point in the future for goods or services. Because cash flows can fluctuate wildly — even something like a delay in the mail can affect cash flow — you don't want to use cash collection from customers as a measure of sales. Besides that, you can easily track cash collections from customers. So why not have the extra information about when sales actually occur?

Expense Principle

The expense principle states that an expense occurs when the business uses goods or receives services. In other words, the expense principle is the flip side of the revenue principle. As is the case with the revenue principle, if you receive some goods, simply receiving the goods means that you've incurred the expense of the goods. Similarly, if you received some service — services from your lawyer, for example — you have incurred the expense. It doesn't matter that your lawyer takes a few days or a few weeks to send you the bill. You incur an expense when goods or services are received.

Matching Principle

The matching principle is related to the revenue and the expense principles. The matching principle states that when you recognize revenue, you should match related expenses with the revenue. The best example of the matching principle concerns the case of businesses that resell inventory. In the hot dog stand example, you should count the expense of a hot dog and the expense of a bun on the day when you sell that hot dog and that bun. Don't count the expense when you buy the buns and the dogs. Count the expense when you sell them. In other words, match the expense of the item with the revenue of the item.

Tip

Accrual-based accounting, which is a term you've probably heard, is what you get when you apply the revenue principle, the expense principle, and the matching principle. In a nutshell, accrual-based accounting means that you record revenue when a sale is made and record expenses when goods are used or services are received.

Cost Principle

The cost principle states that amounts in your accounting system should be quantified, or measured, by using historical cost. For example, if you have a business and the business owns a building, that building, according to the cost principle, shows up on your balance sheet at its historical cost. You don't adjust the values in an accounting system for changes in a fair market value. You use the original historical costs.

Objectivity Principle

The objectivity principle states that accounting measurements and accounting reports should use objective, factual, and verifiable data. In other words, accountants, accounting systems, and accounting reports should rely on subjectivity as little as possible.

An accountant always wants to use objective data (even if it's bad) rather than subjective data (even if the subjective data is arguably better). The idea is that objectivity becomes a protection against the corrupting influence that subjectivity can introduce into a firm's accounting records.

Continuity Assumption

The continuity assumption — accountants call it an assumption rather than a principle for reasons unbeknownst to me — states that accounting systems assume that a business will continue to operate. The importance of the continuity assumption becomes most clear if you consider the ramifications of assuming that a business won't continue. If a business won't continue, it becomes very unclear how one should value assets if the assets have no resale value. This sounds like gobbledygook, but think about the implicit continuity assumption built into the balance sheet for the hot dog stand at the beginning of the day.

Implicit in that balance sheet is the assumption that hot dogs and hot dog buns have some value because they can be sold. If a business won't continue operations, no assurance exists that any of the inventory can be sold. If the inventory can't be sold, what does that say about the owner's equity value shown in the balance sheet?

You can see, I hope, the sorts of accounting problems that you get into without the assumption that the business will continue to operate.

Unit-of-Measure Assumption

The unit-of-measure assumption assumes that a business's domestic currency is the appropriate unit of measure for the business to use in its accounting. In other words, the unit-of-measure assumption states that it's okay for U.S. businesses to use U.S. dollars in their accounting. And it's okay for U.K. businesses to use pounds sterling as the unit of measure in their accounting system. The unit-of-measure assumption also states, implicitly, that even though inflation and occasionally deflation change the purchasing power of the unit of measure used in the accounting system, that's still okay. Sure, inflation and deflation foul up some of the numbers in a firm's financial statements. But the unit-of-measure assumption says that's usually okay — especially in light of the fact that no better alternatives exist.

Separate Entity Assumption

The separate entity assumption states that a business entity, like a sole proprietorship, is a separate entity, a separate thing from its business owner. And the separate entity assumption says that a partnership is a separate thing from the partners who own part of the business. The separate entity assumption, therefore, enables one to prepare financial statements just for the sole proprietorship or just for the partnership. As a result, the separate entity assumption also relies on a business being separate and distinct and definable as compared to its business owners.

Other Accounting Statements | Reviewing the Common Financial Statements

Other Accounting Statements

You can probably come up with examples of several other popular or useful accounting reports. Not surprisingly, a good accounting system such as QuickBooks produces most of these reports. For example, one very common report or financial statement is a list of the amounts that your customers owe you. It's a good idea to prepare and review such reports on a regular basis to make sure that you don't have customers turning into collection problems.

Table 1 shows how the simplest sort of accounts receivable report may look: Each customer is named along with the amount owed.

Table 1: An Accounts Receivable Report at End of Day

Customer	Amount
W. Churchill	$45.12
G. Patton	34.32
B. Montgomery	12.34
H. Petain	65.87
C. de Gaulle	43.21
Total receivables	$200.86

Table shows another common accounting report — an inventory report that the hot dog stand may have at the start of the day. An inventory report like the one shown in Table 2 would probably name the various items held for resale, the quantity held, and the amount or value of the inventory item. A report such as this is useful to make sure that you have the appropriate quantities of inventory in stock. (Think of how useful such a report would be if you really were planning to sell thousands of hot dogs at major sporting events in your hometown.)

Table 2: An Inventory Report at Start of Day

Item	Quantity	Amount
Kielbasa	2000	$900.00
Bratwurst	2000	1,000.00
Plain buns	2000	500.00
Sesame buns	2000	600.00
Total inventory		$3,000.00

Putting it All Together

By now, you should understand what an accounting system does. When you boil everything down to its essence, it's straightforward, isn't it? Really, an accounting system just provides you with the financial information that you need to run your business.

Let me add a tangential but important point. QuickBooks supplies all this accounting information. For the most part, preparing these sorts of financial statements in QuickBooks is pretty darn easy. But first, you'll find it helpful to learn a bit more about accounting and bookkeeping. I go over that information in the coming chapters. Also, note that the big picture stuff covered in this chapter is the most important knowledge that you need. If you understand the ideas described in this chapter, the battle is more than half won.

Principles of Accounting

Any discussion of how to use QuickBooks to better manage your business begins with a discussion of the basics of accounting. For this reason, in this chapter and the next two, I attempt to provide the same information that you would receive in an introductory college accounting course. Of course, I tailor the entire discussion to QuickBooks and the small business environment. What you'll read about here and in the next chapters of this book pretty much describes how accounting works in a small-business setting using QuickBooks.

If you've had some experience with accounting, if you know how to read an income statement and balance sheet, or if you know how to construct a journal entry, you don't need to read this chapter or the next. However, if you're new to accounting and business bookkeeping, take the time to carefully read this chapter. The chapter starts by giving a high-level overview of the purpose of accounting. Then I review the common financial statements that any accounting system worth its salt produces. I also discuss some of the important principles of accounting and the philosophy of accounting. Finally, I talk a little bit about income tax law and tax accounting.

The Purpose of Accounting

In the movie Creator, Peter O'Toole plays an eccentric professor. At one point, O'Toole's character attempts to talk a young student into working as an unpaid research assistant. When the student protests, noting that he needs 15 credit hours, O'Toole creates a special 15-credit independent study named "Introduction to the Big Picture." Below, I describe the "big picture" of accounting. At its very core, accounting makes perfect, logical sense.

The Big Picture

The most important thing to understand about accounting is that it provides financial information to stakeholders. Stakeholders are the people who do business with or interact with a firm; they include managers, employees, investors, banks, vendors, government authorities, and agencies who may tax a firm. Stakeholders and their information requirements deserve a bit more discussion. Why? Because the information needs of these stakeholders determine what an accounting system must do.

Managers, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

The first category of stakeholders includes the firm's managers, investors, and entrepreneurs. This group needs financial information to determine whether a business is making money. This group also wants any information that gives insight into whether a business is growing or contracting and how healthy or sick it is. To fulfill its obligations and duties, this group often needs detailed information. For example, a manager or entrepreneur may want to know which customers are particularly profitable — or unprofitable. An active investor may want to know which product lines are growing or contracting.

A related set of information requirements concerns asset and liability record keeping. An asset is something that the firm owns, such as cash, inventory, or equipment. A liability is some debt or obligation that the firm owes, such as bank loans and accounts payable.

Obviously, someone at a firm — perhaps a manager, bookkeeper, or accountant — needs to have very detailed records of the amount of cash that the firm has in its bank accounts, the inventory that the firm has in its warehouse or on its shelves, and the equipment that the firm owns and uses in its operations.

If you look over the preceding two paragraphs, nothing I've said is particularly surprising. It makes sense, right? Someone who works in a business, manages a business, or actively invests in a business needs good general information about the financial affairs of the firm and, in many cases, very detailed information about important assets (such as cash) and liabilities (such as bank loans).

External Creditors

A second category of stakeholders includes outside firms that loan money to a business and credit reporting agencies that supply information to these lenders. For example, banks want to know about the financial affairs and financial condition of a firm before lending money. The accounting system needs to produce the financial information that a bank requires in order to consider a loan request.

What information do lenders want? Lenders want to know that a business is profitable and enjoys a positive cash flow. Profits and positive cash flows allow a business to easily repay debt. A bank or other lender also wants to see assets that could be liquidated, in a worst case scenario, to pay a loan — and also other debts that may represent a claim on the firm's assets.

Vendors also typically require financial information from a firm. A vendor often loans money to a firm by extending trade credit. What's noteworthy about this is that vendors sometimes require special accounting. For example, one of the categories of vendors that a company such as Wiley Publishing, Inc., deals with is authors. In order to pay an author the royalty that he or she is entitled to, Wiley puts in a fair amount of work to calculate royalty-per-unit amounts and then reports and remits these amounts to authors.

Other firms sometimes have similar financial reporting requirements for vendors. Franchisees (such as the man or woman who owns and operates the local McDonald's) pay a franchise fee based on revenues. Retailers may perform special accounting and reporting in order to enjoy rebates and incentives from the manufacturers of the products that they sell.

Government Agencies

Predictable stakeholders that require financial information from a business are the federal and state government agencies with jurisdiction over the firm. For example, every business in the United States needs to report on its revenues, expenses, and profits so that the firm can correctly calculate income tax due to the federal government and then pay that tax.

Firms with employees must also report to the federal and state government on wages paid to those employees — and pay payroll taxes based on metrics, such as number of employees, wages paid to employees, and unemployment benefits claimed by past employees.

Providing this sort of financial information to government agencies represents a key duty of a firm's accounting system.

Business Form Generation

In addition to the financial reporting described in the preceding paragraphs, accounting systems typically perform one other key task for businesses: producing business forms. For example, an accounting system almost always produces the checks needed to pay vendors. In addition, an accounting system prepares the invoices and payroll checks. More sophisticated accounting systems, such as those used by large firms, prepare many other business forms including purchase orders, monthly customer statements, credit memos to customers, sales receipts, and so forth.

Tip

Every accounting function that I've described so far is performed ably by each of the versions of QuickBooks: QuickBooks Simple Start, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise.