Setting Up Quickbooks

Excerpted from The Farmer’s Office by Julia Shanks

The Initial Setup

When you first open up QuickBooks, you will want to Create a New Company
and select Advanced Setup. QB will guide you through an interview process.
Following are the questions QB asks, with my suggestions on how to answer
(and set your preferences). You may change your preferences at any time in
the future, by accessing the Preferences window.

1. Enter your company information. The address and contact information
you enter here will also populate invoice and sales receipts templates. Be
sure to enter the address as you want it to appear on invoices. You don’t
need to add your Tax ID number if you don’t feel comfortable (QB will
use it to generate end-of-year tax forms).
Click Next.

2. Select Industry. By knowing your industry, QB recommends tax forms
and account settings. Select Agriculture, Ranching, or Farming.

3. How is your company organized? This will help QB generate reports for
tax filings. If you’re unsure about your “corporate structure,” ask your
accountant or select sole proprietor.

4. Select the first month of your fiscal year. Most often, the fiscal year
starts in January. And it’s easier to think of the calendar year as the fiscal
year. However, if you sell winter and storage crops, such as beets and
apples, you grow in the summer and autumn but do not sell out until
March. In that case, you may prefer to align your growing cycle with your
fiscal year. In this example, your fiscal year would be April–March, and
the first month of your fiscal year would be April.

5. Set up your administrator password. You can protect your QB account
with a password, and no one will be able to access the account without
it. This can be especially important if your computer is left in the barn
or other public area. If you are unconcerned about password protection,
you can skip this.

At this point QB will generate your company file. You will need to save it to your
computer. After this, you can start customizing how QB will work for you.

For more help on setting up QuickBooks, watch these webinars: Getting Started with QuickBooks and QuickBooks: Expenses and Sales at juliashanks.com/video-tutorials/

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The Farmer’s Office by Julia Shanks and published by New Society Publishers, 2016.