The Inside Story.
A brief discussion of the internal
structure of QuickBooks accounts XE
"accounts:structure" will
make reasons and details clear as you learn
the programs. Intuit does not disclose
any information about the database, and some
of the following information is assumed from
the operation of the programs.
QuickBooks is the direct
heir of some essential Quicken concepts,
although it has greatly diverged from
Quicken. All balance sheet accounts
derive from the Quicken checking
account. Liability and equity accounts
show balances with plusses and minusses
reversed. Like asset accounts, they are
involved with the net worth of the company
Income and expense
accounts grew from the “category” labels on
Quicken transactions. This is why these
accounts have no registers. All of
their transactions are recorded in balance
sheet accounts. Reference to the income
or expense accounts, in the balance
transactions, make the record of the income
or expense transaction. Like equity
accounts, income accounts usually contain
negative numbers and reverse them for display.
The payment of a bill is an example of a “transfer” transaction, XE
"transfer" from one balance sheet
account to another. QuickBooks
transfers money from the checking account to
accounts payable. Instead of referring
to an income or expense account, the
transactions contain a reference (link) to a
specific transaction in the other balance
sheet account, here, payables. At the
other end, the account contains a link back
to the original transaction. The
secondary transaction also includes coding
that it is a derived transaction.
In the graphics versions,
transactions generally do not have copies of
information that is in lists. Where you
see an entity from a list, the transaction
contains a number referring to some list,
such as customers, accounts, or
classes. This explains a trick of
QuickBooks. When you change an account
name, you instantly change the account name
in every transaction that uses it. This
specific example also applies to the DOS
versions. But DOS and graphics versions
are quite different, as for example in notes
appended to the bottom of an
invoice. The DOS versions have a
memorized list of notes, which may be copied
into an invoice (and edited there.) The
graphics versions have these notes in a
list, The invoice does not contain the
note, but only a reference location of the
note, in the list. If the note is
edited on a subsequent invoice, this will
change previous invoices using that
note.
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