Question

• What is the purpose of setting preferences in QuickBooks Accountant?
• Do all businesses use account numbers? Why or why not?
• Why is it important to back up your QuickBooks Accountant file?

Answer 1

Accounting preferences are rules for your QuickBooks program that relate to your company’s unique way of using this program. Included in this section are the opportunity to turn on or off the account numbering feature and the opportunity to use other important features such as class tracking and automatically assigning numbers to journal entries. There’s also an option here to require users to enter account numbers on QuickBooks forms.

Turning off account numbers does not remove the numbers. If you decide to turn off the account numbers option, (for example, if you want to print a report that doesn’t display account numbers) the numbers you assigned to accounts remain in place. The next time you turn on account numbers, all the numbers return.

Data loss can happen at any time. Natural disasters can destroy local copies of your data, viruses can render it unreadable, and employees can create errors that permanently skew your reports, making them all but useless. When these disasters happen and you don’t already have a reliable backup of your Quickbooks data, you may lose access to:

• Sales tracking and reports
• Expense tracking
• Tax reports
• Invoice data
• Payroll data
• And more

Each of these losses can create holes in your financial reporting, contributing to lost time and resources as you struggle to fill them with whatever information you can pull together.