Accounts make up the general ledger and are the most important record type in QuickBooks. Each account acts as an accumulator for transactions posted to it. Asset, Liability, and Equity type accounts have perpetual balances. Balances for Income and Expense type accounts are theoretically reset to zero at the end of each accounting period, with the difference posted to the Equity account.

QuickBooks uses nested accounts, which can be up to up to 5 levels deep. The balance of any nested account is automatically summed to it's parent.

There are 15 types of general ledger accounts, broken down as follows:

Asset: Bank, Accounts Receivable, Other Current Asset (which normally includes inventory items), Fixed Asset, Other Asset.

Liability: Accounts Payable, Credit Card, Current Liability, Long Term Liability.

Equity: Equity

Income: Income, Other Income

Expense: Expense, Other Expense, Cost of Goods Sold (similar to type expense)

Accounts can optionally use account numbers. There is an option in the file preferences to require account numbers when an account is entered, but in most files it is not used.

Classes are used in QuickBooks to group transactions so reports can have dollar amounts separated by department, division, location, or any other user defined grouping.

If and how they are used is not critical and there are no enforcement mechanisms in QuickBooks to ensure they are entered. In most of the data files we have examined, they are either not used at all or used only on some transactions - which makes them useless for reporting.

Currencies are new - as of QuickBooks  2009.  They are for companies that do international business - allowing transactions entered using a foreign currency.  Users can assign a currency to customers, vendors, price levels, and accounts of type bank, credit card, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.  (Other account types always use the home currency).

Money amounts used in transactions are always stored only in the home currency.  When transactions are entered, the money amounts are immediately converted from the foreign currency to the home currency at whatever exchange rate was applicable as of the date the transaction occurred.

Very few of the U.S. data files we have seen use multiple currencies (which will probably change in the future), but they are prevalent in Canadian versions. Note also that additional Intuit services, such as payroll and online banking, are only available if the home currency is the US dollar.

Terms are payment terms that can apply to both receivables paid by customers and payables paid to vendors.

There are 2 categories of terms - date driven, where payment is due by a certain day of the month, and days driven where payment is due within a specific number of days.

Terms affect transaction processing in that dates are set in transaction documents based on terms that were selected when the document was initially created.

Budgets are used to enter projected income and expenses or projected account balances by month.

Each budget record has projected amounts for a full year. The kAcct and nYear fields are always present. All months do not need to be filled in.

Budget amounts do not affect transaction processing. They are only used for reports and graphs. Also note that budgets take a lot of extra time to extract and may be eliminated in future versions of OfficeQ6.