What are your major revenue centers? Do they have their own independent income and expense. Do you need to sometimes see them together and apart? If so you may need to use classes in QuickBooks. This function allows the classification of transactions into “classes” or “departments”. This allows you to see the independent income and expenses of these segments of your business.
For example if you are a non-profit with an education budget, administration budget, and programs budget you may want to see each of those as a separate income statement and not want so have three accounts for postage, three accounts for salary and three accounts for everything else. Another example would be if you are construction company that needs to track your caretaking profits separate from your construction profit. Using classes would allow you to see the income and expenses for each segment of this business.
To turn on the class tracking function in QuickBooks you need to go to the preferences option under the edit drop down menu. Under the accounting preferences for the company you need to click the check box “use class tracking”. Once the class tracking is turned on a new option will appear under the lists menu. Using the “Class List” you can then add classes and subclasses for each department or class you are looking to track. A new column will now appear on your function windows such as the check window, journal window and deposit window. By assigning classes to your transactions it will allow you to pull reports by class and thus see your income and expense by departments. QuickBooks 2011 will also allow you to pull a balance sheet by class or department, but earlier versions will not.
