Home Page

The QuickBooks Home page provides a big picture of how your essential business tasks fit together. Tasks are organized into logical groups (Customer, Vendor, Employee, Company, and Banking) with workflow arrows to help you learn how tasks relate to each other and to help you decide what to do next.

Note: The workflow arrows indicate a logical progression of business tasks in QuickBooks. However, these arrows do not restrict you from doing tasks in a different order or an order that works better for your business needs.

Viewing the Home Page

The Home Page appears when you launch QuickBooks. If you close the Home Page, you can access it again anytime by choosing Company > Home Page.

Note: Icons on the Home Page may be greyed out based on your Preferences. For example, if estimates are not turned on in Preferences, then the Estimates icon will be greyed out on the Home Page. Choose QuickBooks > Preferences to review your settings.

Information Overview

Pay Bills When you see a red circle with a number over an icon on the Home Page, place your cursor over the icon to get an overview of information without having to leave the Home Page. For example, rolling over Pay Bills displays how many bills are open and the total amount of the open bills. Then you can click “Go to Pay Bills” to go directly to the Pay Bills window. Or click the total opening balance number to open a report explaining the figure.

Home Page Placard

Note: If you see ! for the number over the icon, then you have over 99 transactions of that type.

On the Check Register icon, you can hover over the Infoto see the Check Register or go to the Chart of Accounts.

Instant Access

Click any icon to go directly to the window that will help you to complete a task. For example, click Estimates to display the Create Estimates window. If an icon is grayed out, that feature is turned off in Preferences (QuickBooks > Preferences).

Payroll

If you've haven't set up Payroll for your employees, the Set Up Payroll icon appears in the Employees section. But if you've set up payroll, the icons for your payroll tasks appear in the section.