Microcomputer Accounting Applications
Lesson 8
New Company Setup
Note: These comments do not replace the material in the chapter. They are intended to
reinforce and highlight important data from the text as well as to review relevant accounting
principles. You should always thoroughly read your text while completing the tutorial steps.
Lesson 8 Comments
In Chapter 8, you will learn to set up a new company file in QuickBooks. You will use the
EasyStep Interview to accomplish this task. In the EasyStep Interview, the business owner
answers a series of questions that QuickBooks uses to establish the settings for a new
company file.
EasyStep Interview – Opening Balances
The EasyStep Interview can be used to set up a new as well as an existing company. If you
are creating a QuickBooks file for a new company, you will have no opening account
balances. When creating a QuickBooks file for an existing company, you can enter your
opening Cash Balance in the EasyStep Interview. Any existing balances in Accounts
Receivable or Accounts Payable should be entered when the customer or vendor is set up in
QuickBooks. For merchandising companies, inventory value and items-on-hand balances
are established in the New Item window. Be sure to use the Start Date entered in the
EasyStep Interview as your Opening Balance Date.
Start Date
Your start date is the date you want to begin tracking your business in QuickBooks. You can
choose any start date that you want. If you are setting up QuickBooks for a brand new
company, the start date should be set to the date you begin your business.
The start date for an existing company can be more complicated. Three common options for
the start date of an existing company are
 the date you begin using QuickBooks
 the date on which you started your business
 the beginning of the current fiscal year
To decide what start date to use for an existing company, first decide how important having
all your business data loaded in QuickBooks is to you. For all your business data to be
stored in QuickBooks, you will need to enter historical transactions and will need to have
complete and accurate accounting data available to enter into QuickBooks. The process of
entering historical transactions into a new QuickBooks file can be quite cumbersome, so you
may choose to set the start date for your existing company as of the date you begin using QB
or the beginning of the current fiscal year.
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Once the new file is created, you will work with the chart of accounts, the customer and
vendor lists, and the item list. You have worked with all of these areas in previous lessons.
In this tutorial, you will be given the information to enter in the EasyStep Interview for a new
business. If you were a business owner going through this process, you would answer the
questions appropriately for your company. For the course project, you will create a new
company file and answer the EasyStep Interview questions from a company narrative.
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