Backing up your QuickBooks data
Making a backup copy of your QuickBooks company is highly recommended.

Creating paychecks
Creating your weekly paychecks.

Paying bills due the following week
Use the Reminder feature to stay on top of upcoming bills due the following week.

Printing tasks
Printing any unprinted invoices, sales receipts, credit memos, statements, and mail.

Creating a cash flow forecast report
Use this report to review your anticipated cash flow for the next few weeks. 

You can use the To Do notes and Reminders to keep tasks on track.

• Making a backup copy of your QuickBooks company
  Making a backup copy of your QuickBooks company data is highly recommended!  Keep this copy offsite, perhaps in a safe deposit box.  This procedure safeguards you from losing valuable data in case of fire, flood, theft, or other disasters at your office.
  
• Paying your payroll taxes
  This task may be weekly for you.   Check with the IRS and your state tax board to determine your schedule for payroll tax remittance.
  
• Paying your sales tax
  Check with your state and local tax boards regarding your sales tax liability and payment schedule.
  
• Reconciling your accounts
  Don't let these pile up!   Reconcile your checking and credit card accounts when you receive your statements.
  
• Billing your customers
  Printing and mailing monthly reminder or billing statements to send to your customers.
  
• Printing a collections report
  Use the collections report as a tool to contact customers with past due balances.
  
• Creating a budget report
  Create a budget report to check how close you are to your budget. If you are grossly over or under budget, consider revising that particular budget. For more information, search the Help Index for budgets, reports about.
  
  What should I be doing quarterly? 

• Paying sales tax due
• Check with your state and local tax boards regarding your sales tax liability and payment schedule.
• Filling Form 941 and state withholding forms
• Form 941 is also known as the Employer's Quarterly Federal Tax Return.
• Creating a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet
• See profit and loss reports or see balance sheets.
• Analyzing your financial position
• Analyze your financial position by running the financial analysis decision tools.

Year-end tasks include making any year-end entries, archiving last year's data, and gathering information for your tax forms.  The great news for year end is that QuickBooks does not require you to close your books!

Not closing your books has two major advantages:

• You always have easy access to all your old data, including all transaction details
• You can create comparison reports to compare this year with last year

You can protect the prior year's transactions from accidental change by using a password.

Use the Year End Guide to help you with year end tasks. QuickBooks Year End Guide will guide you through a checklist of year end tasks. It will help you wrap up the business year, archive your QuickBooks files, and get ready for the new year.

To find the Year End Guide, choose Help Index from the Help menu, and then enter "year end guide."

Cleaning up data

If your company file has grown too large, you can reduce its size by having QuickBooks clean up the transactions for a period of time that you designate.  You might also choose to clean up your company file yearly, especially if your company file is quite large. Cleaning up large files can sometimes improve the performance of QuickBooks.

When you clean up data, you specify an ending date for the period of time you want to clean up. To give unpaid bills and uncleared transactions some time to complete, it is best to choose an end date that is a month or more in the past.

Transactions dated after your selected ending date are not affected.  For example, if your ending date is 12/31/02, all transactions dated 1/1/03 and later remain intact in your company file.

When you clean up your company file, QuickBooks deletes only closed transactions. Open transactions are retained.

The Clean Up Company Data wizard lets you choose to clean up transactions as of a specific ending date or you can remove all transactions.  You can further refine the process by selecting additional criteria for removing transactions.

Examples of deleted transactions:

• If an invoice has been paid in full, QuickBooks deletes the details and includes the amount in a summary transaction showing income accounts.  Neither the customer name nor the items sold is retained.  However, if an invoice is unprinted, unpaid, partially paid, or marked as pending, QuickBooks leaves the invoice in your file so you can apply payments to the invoice.
• If you have paid a bill for a reimbursable expense, QuickBooks deletes the bill regardless of whether you have invoiced the customer for the expense.
• If you have QuickBooks Pro or Premier, cleaning up deletes only those estimates that are dated on or before the ending date and that have a job status of Closed.  If an estimate has any other job status (Pending, Awarded, In Progress, Not Awarded, or None), QuickBooks retains the estimate regardless of its date.

• How cleaning up data affects your reports

Account balances

After you clean up your data, you can still create reports that summarize financial activity for the period of time you cleaned up.  For example, if you clean up last fiscal year's data, you can still create profit and loss reports that compare last year's results to this year's.This is because QuickBooks adds summary transactions to your company file to preserve monthly account balances.

Transaction detail

After you clean up your data, you won't be able to create reports that show daily detail for the period of time you cleaned up.  This is because QuickBooks has deleted the individual transactions that would have provided the detail.  In addition, you won't be able to create reports that show balances for individual customers or vendors over that period of time.   As a result, the totals for sales revenue on sales tax liability reports will be incorrect.  As a precaution, QuickBooks creates a backup file in case you need access to the deleted transactions later.

Cash basis reports

After you clean up your data, you won't get an accurate cash basis report for data that includes a cleaned up time period.  This is because QuickBooks has deleted the individual transactions that would have provided the information about whether transactions were paid. As a result, the totals will be incorrect.