Fixes, pricing, and comparisons for small business software.
A messy QuickBooks file rarely breaks all at once. It gets a little worse every month, with duplicate vendors, uncategorized transactions, and a bank account that stopped matching sometime last spring. This guide shows how to clean up a messy QuickBooks file in the right order, so each fix builds on the last one instead … Read more
Setting up sales tax in QuickBooks correctly before you send your first invoice saves you from amending filings later, since fixing tax on invoices already sent is far more work than configuring it right from the start. Here’s how to set up sales tax in QuickBooks for your specific state, and what to check before … Read more
Undeposited Funds is one of the most confusing accounts in QuickBooks for new users, but it exists for a genuinely practical reason: it holds customer payments you’ve received until you actually deposit them at the bank, since a single bank deposit is often several customer payments bundled together. Here’s how to handle undeposited funds in … Read more
A profit and loss report tells you whether your business actually made money over a given period, but only if the numbers behind it are accurate and you know what you’re looking at. Here’s how to run a P&L report in QuickBooks that actually makes sense, and how to read it without getting lost in … Read more
Reconciling a bank account in QuickBooks confirms that what’s recorded in your books actually matches what happened in your real bank account, catching missing transactions, duplicates, or typos before they turn into a bigger problem. Here’s how to reconcile a bank account in QuickBooks, step by step, and what to do when the numbers don’t … Read more
Categorizing transactions in QuickBooks correctly is what makes every report you run afterward accurate, a profit and loss statement, a tax summary, a simple check of where your money went. Get it wrong consistently and every one of those reports quietly inherits the mistake. Here’s how to categorize transactions in QuickBooks without the errors that … Read more
Setting up a chart of accounts in QuickBooks correctly the first time saves you from recategorizing months of transactions later. Every report you’ll ever run, profit and loss, balance sheet, tax summaries, pulls directly from these categories, so getting the structure right upfront matters more than almost any other setup decision. Here’s how to set … Read more
Setting up QuickBooks for the first time goes wrong in the same handful of ways for almost everyone: the chart of accounts is copied from a template that doesn’t match the business, sales tax gets configured after the first invoice instead of before, and nobody sets a clear process for reconciling until three months of … Read more
QuickBooks error codes are not random. They cluster into a small number of causes, a damaged company file, a network permission problem, a stuck update, or a corrupted payroll component, and once you know which bucket you are in, the fix is usually predictable. This page groups every common QuickBooks error by what actually causes … Read more