5 VERY Basic Peachtree Tips

Once you've been working in Peachtree Accounting for a while, it's difficult to understand how you could have possibly remained stumped for days on how to enter a new vendor, or change somebody's pay rate! However, when everything's new and you’re in the middle of learning, small misunderstandings and little annoyances like hard-to-see buttons and missed checkboxes can hamstring your small business accounting software work for days. Today we go through a few very basic Peachtree procedures that often confuse new users.

Adding new customers
You can either select the field in the transaction dialog box, then double click on it to get to Maintain; or simply select the field and then press + on your number pad.

Setting up a job
Jobs have to be associated with customers, so once you have entered a customers to assign the job to, simply

• Choose Job Costs : Jobs under Maintain
• Assign the customer ID
• Fill in the tabs General, Estimated Exp/Rev and Custom Fields
• If you are entering more than one job for a customer, click Save before repeating steps 2 and 3
  

Insert payments from customers

Remember that this process within Peachtree Quantum or any Peachtree product is only for receiving invoiced amounts. Any other deposits have to go under Miscellaneous Deposits (instructions below!).

• Go to Tasks> Receipts
• Enter your customer ID
• Enter the check number
• Enter the date
• Enter the payment method
• Enter the business account to be credited
• Enter the Amount
• Importantly, remember to click 'Apply to Invoice' so that you don't bill them again!
• Click the pay column
• Click post, then either enter another invoice or close the screen

Merging old and new data

If you've had to restore your Peachtree file from a backup, and have new data to put into it (from another computer),you can export the data to merge it. The Rebuild section in Peachtree help will give you detailed instructions.

Entering invoices

You'll assign each invoice to a particular job - entering your invoice will increase both the sales account and your accounts receivable. Here's how to enter a new invoice:

• Go to Tasks> Sales/Invoices
• Enter the customer ID
• Enter the invoice number, the date, the item, description and the unit price and amount per unit.
• Click Post.

Simple! Once you have been using Peachtree for a couple of months, you'll be amazed at how simple it becomes. In the meantime, Peachtree business software training is available all over the country at very reasonable rates.

Peachtree User Problems Solved]

Peachtree Quantum, and all the other Peachtree Accounting programs, are very comprehensive offerings. There is a lot that they can do, many different ways to do the same thing ... and sometimes even little errors that slip past the eagle-eyed developers! So today we check out some of the recent problems and queries that people in the Peachtree business software user community have been experiencing, and the solutions to them.

Paying a company owners without a payroll

Having a payroll is not only a headache with few employees, but a massive extra training and tax expense. Some users have recently been asking about how they should pay themselves within Peachtree software without setting up a payroll. Of course, owners' equity accounts can be set up within Peachtree, but really this question is one for an accountant that has your full financial details rather than the software developer.

Disappearing quotes

One mysterious problem that Peachtree's internal support was actually unable to answer has been solved by the intrepid and expert small business accounting software user community. The problem occurs in Peachtree Quantum 2009; some quotes are not disappearing after they are converted into sales invoices, they remain in the quote list. The short-term solution is to simply manually delete it from the quote register. However, some people have been able to get their quotes to automatically convert by switching from SMART POSTING to REAL TIME POSTING. As a note, though, in the 2010 release, quotes will not disappear from the list after they have been converted - this is a deliberate change.

Printing issues with journal entries

Some users have had problems printing journal entries, with the problem occurring in both the sample and real company, and when the journal entry is dated. This appears to be a symptom of corrupted data or files - running data verification and reinstalling the program has fixed it for some Peachtree Accounting users.