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Understanding preferences within QuickBooks is a vital portion of the accounting system. Preferences allow us to customize various items within our screen. In front of you, you'll see that I have opened up the preferences window. The left-hand side is broken down into the various areas that I can set a variety of preferences. You'll notice that the sales tax area takes me right into components for adding sales tax. Jobs and estimates will allow me to see if they're pending or if they're awarded. My general will allow me to even set my decimal places and whether or not I want to use minutes rather than decimals for a portion of an hour. Let's start with our accounting system and look at our company preferences. First, let's begin by how I got to this screen. I'm going to exit out so that you can see how I turned it on. Let's go up to our menu system. Under edit, I'm going to go down to the bottom and choose preferences. That's it; we have our preference screen open. I'm going to go over to our company preferences and talk about some of the items. Now, please keep in mind that throughout this tutorial I'll make reference to the various components that need to be established within preferences. We'll talk in terms of a general overview at this point and then in each individual section we'll talk about the details that you may want to set within preferences. In our accounting system, for instance, it is not necessary to use account numbers, but the default is to have them turned on. Accounting numbers allow us to group our different accounts into usable functions. We'll see that on our reports. We can expand and collapse these groups to give us detail versus summary reports. For instance, on the right-hand side of my screen, I opened up my chart of accounts. In our chart of accounts, I have 10,000 at my cash account. Underneath you'll notice that 10-4, 10-3 and 10-1 is my petty cash savings and checking. By establishing the account numbers and by turning on the grouping function, I'm able to see a total for all of my cash accounts. That's what the 65,000 dollars balance is. Or I can see the total for each individual account. Now, preferences will allow me to set up whether or not I'm going to require these numbering systems or whether I just want to go by the names cash accounts, petty cash, savings. This is an item that you can discuss with your accountant to determine which method is going to be most common for you. Most small businesses prefer just names rather than the account numbers, but if you are working in conjunction with another program, please check into this first. Whenever we start working with outside programs, they do require that account numbers be set. Other items that we'll find in our preferences are for the customization of our screen. Let's go to checking for instance. You'll notice in the checking area it's going to ask me if I want to be warned about duplicate check numbers, if I want to print account names on vouchers and in my desktop view, it'll ask me if I want to use sales receipts, if I'm going to use statements and statement charges. You'll even notice that I can get information about how to remove a feature from the home page if it's an item that I'm not going to be using. Continuing our journey, if I go into general, I can find out whether or not I want to set my time by decimals or minutes. Under my jobs and estimates, I can set whether I'm going to be using pending versus in progress. You'll notice it's also asking me do you create estimates? Do you do progress invoicing? Sales and customers will allow me to go through and see what my normal shipping method is so that it defaults to my invoice automatically. If you have one of the advanced versions of QuickBooks, such as Premier, you will have the ability to turn on sales orders. Now, please be careful here. Not all versions are going to allow you access to the sales order. Please check with the industry solutions area of your QuickBooks help menu to determine whether you have sales orders in the version that you are using. If I wish, I can also set whether or not I'd like to see spell check set. Now, you'll notice at this point there are no company preferences for spelling. In this instance, I'll just go directly over to my preference. You'll notice now it gives me the option to turn spell check on or off. This is strictly your preference. If you'd like to have all your invoices proofread before sending them out, but your checkmark there. If, of course, you'd like to turn it off, just remove that checkmark. Another handy area is the reminder section of the preference menu. You'll notice I have the ability to show the reminder list when opening a company file. When this opens, I then have the ability to set what QuickBooks will tell me is due. For instance, if last night I ran some checks and I always want to remember to run them just a couple days before the check date itself, I can simply go through checks to print, I can ask it to show a summary of the checks to be actually printed or I can tell QuickBooks never mind, don't remind me at all. Each of these individual areas can be customized so that you get a reminder right when you start QuickBooks. Now again, a word of caution. You'll want to limit how many of these that you set. It can be very frustrating to start QuickBooks and have to go to a host of 10, 12, 15 different reminders before you get into the company. Think in terms of which are the most important for you to be reminded of and use them sparingly. One or two reminders popping up when you start QuickBooks is very effective. Having 30 reminders pop up when you start QuickBooks can be more frustrating than anything else. You will want to take some time to go through each of these preference menus. Nine times out of ten, when there are little tweaks that we'd like to do to QuickBooks, we are going to find that we need to be in this actual preference menu. So take some time to explore, get the feel for the areas that can be customized and then you'll get the most enjoyment out of QuickBooks.