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Rating: 
Summary: Good, could have been better
Review: This is a pretty good introduction to QuickBooks for somebody already familiar with business accounting. It tells you how to do all of the typical things you'd want to do for a small business, often giving alternate approaches that are either faster or more useful that the obvious ones.It has an introduction to accounting mechanics in Appendix B, but that just explains a few basic facts about double-entry accounting systems, and tells you to memorize a table of credit vs. debit effects (e.g. debits increase asset accounts and decrease liability accounts). The book fails to explain why debits sometimes make things go up and sometimes down, something that would've been much more helpful than simple memorization. I would've liked to see a chapter explaining what sorts of accounts a typical company of a specific type would set up, and how they would be used. I like to know *why* I'm doing something as well as *how* I should do it. Perhaps such things are better handled in a general book on business accounting, but a short chapter would've been enough. The tone of the book is generally light-hearted. Occasionally it gets a little thick, e.g. on page 61: "Now this will be a big surprise. (I'm just kidding.) QuickBooks provides descriptions [...] When you choose the command, QuickBooks displays the lost city of Atlantis. Okay, not really. QuickBooks actually displays [...]". It's not usually that silly, but the author's sense of humor does pervade the book.
Rating:
Summary: Good, could have been better
Review: This is a pretty good introduction to QuickBooks for somebody already familiar with business accounting. It tells you how to do all of the typical things you'd want to do for a small business, often giving alternate approaches that are either faster or more useful that the obvious ones. It has an introduction to accounting mechanics in Appendix B, but that just explains a few basic facts about double-entry accounting systems, and tells you to memorize a table of credit vs. debit effects (e.g. debits increase asset accounts and decrease liability accounts). The book fails to explain why debits sometimes make things go up and sometimes down, something that would've been much more helpful than simple memorization. I would've liked to see a chapter explaining what sorts of accounts a typical company of a specific type would set up, and how they would be used. I like to know *why* I'm doing something as well as *how* I should do it. Perhaps such things are better handled in a general book on business accounting, but a short chapter would've been enough. The tone of the book is generally light-hearted. Occasionally it gets a little thick, e.g. on page 61: "Now this will be a big surprise. (I'm just kidding.) QuickBooks provides descriptions [...] When you choose the command, QuickBooks displays the lost city of Atlantis. Okay, not really. QuickBooks actually displays [...]". It's not usually that silly, but the author's sense of humor does pervade the book.
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