Managing Your Business with QuickBooks 6 is a concise, readable book that explains computerized business accounting for small businesses using Intuit's QuickBooks or QuickBooks Pro. QuickBooks, the Quicken of small businesses, is by far the most popular program for small-business accounting. Rather than duplicating the explanation in the manual, this book assumes readers know nothing about accounting procedures and orients them to concepts such as charts of accounts, liabilities, expenses, income, data maintenance, and year-end reporting, using Examples from QuickBooks and QuickBooks Pro.

Readers will find real-world advice on everything from how to budget time for converting to computerized bookkeeping to guidance on how to make QuickBooks an integral part of running their business successfully. Here they'll learn how to use QuickBooks to pay bills and write checks; pay employees; record sales taxes due; prepare weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports for tax reporting; and assess the health of their business. A special appendix gives tips on setting up QuickBooks for 20 different small businesses so that readers can quickly customize QuickBooks for their own particular businesses.

Managing Your Business with QuickBooks 6 goes to great lengths to explain what's involved in converting an existing accounting system to QuickBooks. That information is valuable, since many small-business owners are reluctant to tamper with proven systems. The authors tell how to prepare for the conversion, and walk you through the process of carrying it out.

This book then explains how to use all the key features of QuickBooks and QuickBooks Pro, though other books provide more thorough information in this area. The authors also make recommendations about how to integrate computerized bookkeeping into your established business procedures. In that way, Managing Your Business with QuickBooks 6 is perhaps better suited to providing advance information to those who have not yet installed the software than solving problems for those already using it.

This book's strong point is its appendix, which lists the customizations you should make to tailor QuickBooks to various kinds of businesses. This appendix suggests, for example, that construction companies use classes to distinguish new construction work from remodeling jobs, and that lawyers track multiple cases for the same customer as jobs. --David Wall