Book Image

Mastering QuickBooks 2020

By : Crystalynn Shelton
Book Image

Mastering QuickBooks 2020

By: Crystalynn Shelton

Overview of this book

Intuit QuickBooks is an accounting software package that helps small business owners to manage all their bookkeeping tasks. Its complete range of accounting capabilities, such as tracking income and expenses, managing payroll, simplifying taxes, and accepting online payments, makes QuickBooks software a must-have for business owners and aspiring bookkeepers. This book is a handy guide to using QuickBooks Online to manage accounting tasks and drawing business insights by generating reports easily. Using a fictitious company, the book demonstrates how to create a QuickBooks Online account; customize key settings for a business; manage customers, vendors, and products and services; generate reports; and close the books at the end of the period. QuickBooks records your debits and credits, so you don't need to learn accounting. However, you will find out what happens under the hood and understand how your financial statements are impacted by what you do in QuickBooks. You'll also discover tips, shortcuts, and best practices that will help you save time and become a QuickBooks pro. By the end of this book, you'll have become well-versed with the features of QuickBooks and be able to set up your business and manage all bookkeeping tasks with ease.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Understanding profit and loss statements

The profit and loss statement, also referred to as the income statement, will show you how profitable a business is for a period of time. This report summarizes all the income and expenses that have been incurred by a business for a specific period of time. The difference between income and expenses is shown on the report as either net profit (income exceeds expenses) or net loss (expenses exceed income). Like most reports, you can customize the profit and loss statement to meet your business needs. We will show you how to customize and generate the report in this section.

Follow these steps to customize and generate a profit and loss statement:

  1. Navigate to Reports in the left menu bar, as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. Scroll down to the business overview section and select Profit and Loss, as shown in the following...