QuickBooks 2006 For Dummies
QuickBooks 2006 can help with most of your personal finance needs. Many of these tasks can be even easier if you know some tricks, including keyboard shortcuts, calculation and editing tricks, and general insight about the QuickBooks interface. Pay special attention to keeping your debits and credits straight, as this is probably the primary reason you're using QuickBooks 2006 in the first place.
Use QuickBooks 2006 to Keep Your Debits and Credits Straight
Assets = Liabilities + Owner's Equity. When using QuickBooks 2006, the natural balance for asset accounts is on the left (debit), the natural balance for liability and owner's equity accounts is on the right (credit). The exceptions are contra accounts and expense accounts that add or deduct from other accounts to form a net amount.
|Assets||Increase asset accounts||Decrease asset accounts|
|Liabilities||Decrease liability accounts||Increase liability accounts|
|Owner's equity||Decrease owner's equity accounts||Increase owner's equity accounts|
|Income||Decrease income accounts||Increase income accounts|
|Expenses||Increase expense accounts||Decrease expense accounts|
QuickBooks 2006 Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts make just about any task faster and easier. The following table shows you the keyboard shortcuts that you can use in QuickBooks 2006.
|Press This PC Shortcut||And QuickBooks Does This|
|Ctrl+A||Displays the Chart of Accounts window|
|Ctrl+C||Copies your selection to the Clipboard|
|Ctrl+F||Displays the Find window|
|Ctrl+G||Goes to the other side of a transfer transaction|
|Ctrl+I||Displays the Create Invoice window|
|Ctrl+J||Displays the Customer:Job List window|
|Ctrl+M||Memorizes a transaction|
|Ctrl+N||Creates a new <fill in the blank> where fill in the blank is whatever is active at the time|
|Ctrl+P||Almost always prints the currently active register, list, or form|
|Ctrl+Q||Creates and displays a QuickReport on the selected transaction|
|Ctrl+R||Displays the Register window|
|Crtl+T||Displays the memorized transaction list|
|Ctrl+V||Pastes the contents of the Clipboard|
|Ctrl+W||Displays the Write Checks window|
|Ctrl+X||Moves your selection to the Clipboard|
|Ctrl+Z||Undoes your last action — usually|
|Ctrl+Ins||Inserts a line into a list of items or expenses|
|Ctrl+Del||Deletes the selected line from a list of items or expenses|
Tips and Tricks for Using QuickBooks 2006
What happens when you right-click in QuickBooks 2013 depends on what you're doing at the time. When you right-click, QuickBooks displays a shortcut menu of common commands for the particular transaction, item, or window you are working in. For example, it often displays commands for memorizing or voiding the transaction, or creating a QuickReport on the transaction. The commands differ based on the type of transaction you select.
Here are some more QuickBooks interface tricks:
To get help, click the How Do I? button in the upper-right corner of the dialog box and choose a topic from the drop-down list.
To move quickly to a specific list box entry, press the letter.
To select a list box entry and choose a dialog box's suggested command button, double-click the entry.
To move the insertion point to the beginning of a field, press Home.
To move the insertion point to the end of a field, press End.
QuickBooks locks the active window into place and then displays a list of windows in its Navigator pane, which is like another little window. To move to a listed window, just click it.
To remove the Navigator, choose View, Open Window List. (You can move the other locked pane which lists windows, called the Shortcuts List, by choosing Lists, Shortcut List.)
To tell QuickBooks to use windows the same way every other program does, choose View, Multiple Windows.
QuickBooks 2006 Calculation and Editing Tricks
QuickBooks 2006 makes it easy for you to perform calculations and editing. If the selection cursor is on an amount field, you can use these symbol keys to make calculations:
|+||Adds the number you just typed to the next number you type|
|-||Subtracts the next number you type from the number you just typed|
|*||Multiplies the number you just typed by the next number you type|
|/||Divides the number you just typed by the next number you type|
If the selection cursor is on a date field, you can use these tricks to edit the date:
|+||Adds one day to the date shown|
|t||Replaces the date shown with today's date|
|-||Subtracts one day from the date shown|
|y||Changes the date to the first day in the year|
|r||Changes to date to the last day in the year|
|m||Changes the date to the first day in the month|
|h||Changes the date to the last day in the month|