conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies about Manage, QuickBooks with the genre: Computers & Technology, Software
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Manage your business finances the easy way with QuickBooks
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: QuickBooks 2012 For Dummies
  So far, we've provided narrative descriptions of all the financial events that affect the balance sheet and the income statement. We described how you started the business with £5,000 of cash (a £4,000 loan from your mother-in-law and £1,000 of cash that you yourself invested). At an even earlier point in this appendix, we noted how you hired out a boat to the Hamsters for £200 and they paid you in cash.
  Although the narrative descriptions of financial events – such as starting the business or hiring a boat to the Hamsters – make for just-bearable reading, they are unwieldy for accountants to use in practice. Partly, this awkwardness is because accountants are usually terrible writers. But an even bigger problem is that using the lots-and-lots-of-words approach makes describing all the little bits and pieces of information that you need difficult and downright tedious.
  Fortunately, about 500 years ago, an Italian monk named Luca Pacioli thought the same thing. No, we're not making this up. What Pacioli really said was, "Hello? Is anybody in there? You have to get more efficient in the way that you describe your financial transactions. You have to create a financial shorthand system that works when you have a large number of transactions to record."
  This system enabled people to name the profit and loss or balance sheet line items or accounts that are affected and then give the pound value of the effect. The profit and loss statement and the balance sheet line items are accounts. You need to remember this term.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A network is a set of connected computers so that the people who use the computers can share information. Uh, well, this is somewhat self-serving, but let me say that if you don't currently use a network, Networking For Dummies, 9th Edition (Doug Lowe), Home Networking For Dummies, 4th Edition (Kathy Ivens), and Wireless Home Networking For Dummies, 3rd Edition (Danny Briere, Pat Hurley, and Edward Ferris) explain how to set up a small business network in a couple of hours and live to tell about it.
  The easiest way to understand record locking is to compare it with the other variety of locking: file locking. Most other programs that you use – perhaps every one but QuickBooks – use file locking. What file locking means is this: If one person on the network has, for instance, a word-processing document open, nobody else on the network can open that document. Others may be able to open a copy of the document that they can save on their computers, but they can't edit the original document. The operating system locks the original document (the file) so that only one person can fool around with the file at a time. This locking ensures the integrity of the data and the changes that people make to the data. (If this business about ensuring integrity seems weird, think about the difficulty of making sure that both people's changes end up in a word-processing document that both people are editing simultaneously.)
  Record locking works differently. With record locking, more than one person on the network can open and edit the same file at once, but only one person can work with a specific record.
  This information may be a bit confusing, but differentiating between files and the records within a file is what makes sharing files possible. In QuickBooks, for example, if Jane is entering one bill for the Alpha Company in a file, Joe can edit a bill for Beta Corporation because the two bills are different records. However, Jane can't – because of record locking – fool around with the Beta Corporation bill that Joe is editing. And Joe can't – again, because of record locking – fiddle with the Alpha Company bill that Jane is entering.
  Restated more generally, no two people can edit the same record in a file at the same time. Record locking enables employees to use a file in a multi-user environment because it lets more than one person work with a file.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: You can change the settings in this dialog box if you want them to be different. Any changes that you make for a particular batch of cheques don't affect the default settings. The next time you print a cheque, your original settings appear again.
  If you're printing a partial page of cheques, enter the number of cheques on the first page in the Number of Cheques on First Page text box.
  QuickBooks prints the cheques, and then you see the Print Cheques – Confirmation dialog box (Figure D-3).
  If your cheques came out all right, take the rest of the day off. Give yourself a raise while you're at it.