In this lesson, you'll meet our project company, Fine Home Consultants Inc., which we'll work with throughout this course. Because Fine Home is both a service and goods provider, you'll learn how to account for many different types of business transactions. Our first task will be to set up the project company in Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008. You'll enter basic company information and set up certain preferences, such as whether you'll operate on the cash or accrual basis of accounting. Not sure what this means? Don't worry! We'll go over basic accounting terms using clear-cut examples.

The next task you'll need to address after setting up your company is creating a chart of accounts. Learn what a chart of accounts is and how it's used. Then we'll take a closer look at each of the accounts within the chart of accounts. Using this info, you'll set up Fine Home's accounts, which will give you the foundation for setting up your own business's chart of accounts.

In this lesson, you'll find out how to write and print checks and make deposits into your checking account. These two tasks are basic to running your business. While paying bills isn't as much fun as receiving payments, you'll see that doing both is very easy. You also learn how to use the software to balance your checking account. After this lesson, you'll never again dread getting your bank statement!

Now that you've written checks to pay bills, learn how to create vendors and item receipts for the items you purchase. By using this option, you'll tie together inventory and accounts payable with check writing. This makes it easier for you to keep an eye on who you owe money to so that you don't pay a vendor late by mistake. It's also the first step in job costing, which gives you much-needed feedback on how well you're managing expenses for different customers and jobs.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to quickly and easily convert item receipts to vendor bills. Then it's a snap to pay vendor bills, another task we'll cover in this lesson. You'll also create and review vendor-related reports and lists that give you the important big picture of your items available for sale and inventory.
 

Now that you know how to enter inventory and service items, it's time to set up your customers and prepare quotes. Learn how to enter information about your clients, ranging from their address to their credit limit. This is a great time-saving feature because once you set up a customer, all quotes and invoices you prepare in the future will automatically fill in with this information. You'll also find out how to prepare professional quotes to get approval from your customer prior to purchasing items for a job.
 

In this lesson, you'll discover how you can convert customer quotes to customer invoices with a click of the mouse. You'll also learn how easy it is to modify quotes and invoices if you make a mistake. Maybe you need to prepare cash invoices for walk-in customers. You'll see how to handle that task as well as how to prepare recurring invoices for customers whom you bill the same amount repeatedly.

Everyone likes to get a paycheck. Find out how to pay yourself, any employees, and any subcontractors you might have. After working through this lesson, you'll see that payroll's very easy to prepare. Yet, in spite of how easy it is, some business owners still consider it an annoying task. If you fall into this category, you'll learn about outsourcing your payroll to one of Microsoft's partners.
 

This lesson is a student favorite. You'll discover how to upload items for sale to eBay and handle customer payments in PayPal without leaving Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008. We'll also explore how to manage your fixed assets and the often-baffling topic of depreciation.

Learn how to arrange all the day-to-day transactions you've been entering into reports, providing feedback about how profitable your project company is. You'll delve into the three financial statements: profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow. Each report takes the information you've entered and arranges it in a way that shows you something a little different about your company. When you create financial statement reports for your own business, they'll also give you guidance for future decision-making.

Every business requires you to make decisions. In this lesson, you'll learn about the day-to-day reports you can use for management decision making and efficient operations. For example, you'll look at the accounts receivable aging, which tells you how much your customers owe you, and the accounts payable report that tells you how much you owe vendors. You'll find that these reports are easy to access from Company Home, which gives you a snapshot of your company's overall financial condition. You'll also learn how to use the Physical Inventory Worksheet to take a count of your items available for sale.