How to Set QuickBooks 2012 General Preferences
The QuickBooks 2012 My Preferences tab of the General Preferences set provides check boxes that you can select to tell QuickBooks to do the following:
To move the selection cursor from one field on the window to the next field when you press Enter
To automatically open drop-down lists when typing
To beep when you record a transaction
To automatically place a decimal point two characters from the right end of the number
To warn you when you are editing an existing transaction
To bring back all the one-time Help messages that it shows
To turn off pop-up messages for products and services
To show ToolTips for clipped text
To warn you when you’re deleting an existing transaction or some item on a list
To run QuickBooks in the background even when you're not using QuickBooks (to make QuickBooks start faster)
To automatically recall account or transaction information — telling QuickBooks, for example, to automatically recall the last transaction for a particular customer, vendor, or employee
To use either today’s date or the last entered date as the default date
To keep custom item information changed as part of entering a transaction
To turn off pop-up suggestions about how to buy items at a discount, deselect the QuickBooks EasySaver box.
If you have specific questions about the My Preferences check boxes that are available for the General Preferences options, click the Help button that appears along the right edge of the Preferences dialog box. QuickBooks provides brief but useful descriptions of how the Preferences options work and what they do.
Here is the Company Preferences tab for the General Preferences set.
The Time Format radio buttons let you specify whether QuickBooks should show the minutes in an hour as a decimal value or as minutes. The Time Format radio button descriptions include examples of how these two approaches vary, so look closely at the dialog box if you have questions.
The Company Preferences tab includes a check box that lets you specify that QuickBooks should always show years using four digits. And the Company Preferences tab includes a check box that you can select to tell QuickBooks that it shouldn’t update the name information for a particular customer, vendor, employee, or other name when you’re saving a new transaction for that customer, vendor, employee, or other name.