QuickBooks 2020 – Section 4 Transcript

The transcripts below come from the QuickBooks 2020 course on Simon Sez IT. You can follow along for free by watching the free QuickBooks 2020 course.

Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 1

Cindy: We are now down to module four. In this particular module we’re going to talk a lot about working with customers and jobs. This is what Accounts Receivable, anything having to do with customers who are people or businesses that buy from you. you have the ability to track those customers in QuickBooks. And also if you have multiple jobs that you do for a particular customer you can track that as well and I’m going to show you how to set all of that up here in this first section, Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 1. There is a part 2. Make sure you watch both parts before you go on. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show you how to set up customers.

The way I’m going to get to a list of my customers is I’m going to go to what’s called the Customer Center. Now there are a couple of different ways I can access the Customer Center. This is the easiest way right here from the Home screen, but I did want you to notice that you have an icon that says Customers on your icon bar. And also if you go to the menu you can click on the Customer Center that way. Any of these three options are going to take you to the same exact place.

What you see here is a list of all of your active customers. You’ll notice that currently they’re alphabetical by last name. QuickBooks is not going to do that automatically for you but it will sort by the first character that you type in. That means that if you type last name, first name when you’re setting them up they’ll all be alphabetical order by last name. Sometimes a customer is a business. That’s okay. It’s still going to be alphabetical by the first letter in that name for that business.

These that look like they’re indented like this, those are jobs for that customer. If your business does not use the job feature that’s okay. You don’t have to set them up.

You’ll notice that I can see the balance the customer owes me as a total and also the balance the customer owes per job.

This column over here is where you can add an attachment. Let’s say you had a Word doc or someone emailed you a particular file that you wanted to attach to this, you saw that I just double clicked right here and that brought up this Attachments window. I can now search my computer. If I had already saved the file once I could go grab it that way, I could scan it in right from here, or I could go to the document center and pull it in that way. I might also have a file that’s in Outlook and I can just drag and drop it here, maybe it’s on my desktop I drag and drop it, or if there’s other folders I can drag and drop them here as well. All of those are ways that I can actually attach that file. When I’m finished I’ll just hit Done and I would see a little paperclip right over here indicating there was an attachment.

There’s also a paperclip here and that’s the same exact thing. It’s just another way to add an attachment to this customer.

When I’m clicked on this customer you’ll notice that I can come right up to the top here, it says Active Customers, and I can pull the list down and look at the list a couple of different ways. I might just want to see the customers that have an open balance right now, maybe anyone with overdue invoices, or almost overdue invoices. I can also look at the whole list by going to All Customers at the top. Any list in QuickBooks you have the ability to take items from that list and make them inactive temporarily. That way you won’t see them when you’re in other areas of QuickBooks and looking at the dropdown list.

Let’s just say that I wanted to go ahead and make Babcock’s Music Shop inactive. If you notice there’s an X here and I just click and that makes it inactive. When I go back now and look at my active customers you’ll notice it’s not on the list. If I wanted to make it active again I just go back and I click the X and it will ask me, Do you want to activate the subs as well, I would say Yes and now it’s active again. And I’ll be able to do that with the Chart of Accounts or with items, any list in QuickBooks.

You’ll notice that whichever customer you’re clicked on you’re going to see information on the right about that customer. I can see the customer’s name, their account number, the terms, their billing address. Notice if I need to see more information up there I can drag this window down a little bit. I can also see their phone number and there’s a link to their email. This would actually send them email right from here. It’s a live hyperlink. I also have the ability to edit this information and pin a note here if I’d like. I’ll show you how to do that here in just a moment.

Here’s several reports for this customer. These are called Quick Reports. Even though the first one says Quick Reports they’re all considered quick reports in QuickBooks. There’s an open balance report, I can show estimates for this customer, and a customer snapshot.

Now way back over here if I wanted to get a map to this particular address or directions I can do this. This will actually use the Google Maps function. It’ll just go online and pull it up automatically for you.

The bottom part of the screen has five different tabs. The first tab shows all the transactions for that particular customer. You’ll notice when you look down the list there’s payments, estimates, invoices and they’re actually sorted in order by date. You can see the little arrow points down next to date right there. That’s how I know that. I can choose to sort by number just by clicking the heading there or go back and sort date again if I wanted to sort it either ascending or descending. I can also filter this by looking at just invoices if I wanted or just credit memos. I can use any of these options to create a filter. I can filter by date as well. You’ll see over here where it says Date. I might look at anything that happened this fiscal year, maybe last fiscal year, but I can also filter by date.

The neat thing about working in this is that I can double click on any of these transactions to go to that particular transaction. If I wanted to see this invoice I just double click on it and it’s going to bring the invoice up. If I wanted to look at it and then close it I could. I could make a change and close it, whatever I wanted to do with this. I’m going to go ahead and close it. I’ll just hit Save & Close at the bottom of the screen and now I’m back to my customer center.

This is a quick way to access the customer transactions. There’s other ways to do it in QuickBooks but I find this to be the easiest way.

At the bottom of this window it says Manage Transactions and there’s a dropdown arrow. There are several different things you can do from here. You might go ahead and create any of these entries. You’ll also notice that at the top of your screen where it says New Transactions this is the same list. These options are all on the Home screen. Chances are you’re not going to be here when you want to create invoices, for example. So that option is there if you wanted to use it but chances are you’re not going to use it from this window.

The next tab over are your contacts. These are contacts that have to do with this particular customer you have selected. It might be that this is the person in the office that you speak with, it might be one of the owners. All you have to do to add a contact is come to the very bottom, you’ll see Manage Contacts, here you can choose Add New, Edit Selected or Delete. If I click Add New you’ll notice that you can go in and put in the person’s title, their first and last name, and then if you want to put in their work phone, fax, mobile, any of these fields you’ll be able to do that. You can also specify if this is an additional contact, a primary contact, or a secondary contact. And I’m going to cancel this but you see that you can have a lot of different contacts here related to this particular customer if that’s what you need to do.

The next tab over are your To Do’s. To Do’s are things that you have to take care of related to this particular customer and/or job. You can see here that a To Do can be a phone call, a fax, an email, a meeting, an appointment, or a task. The way you create a new To Do is you come to the bottom where it says Manage To Do’s and you create a new one. I’m going to go ahead and add one here so you can see what happens when you create a To Do. Here’s where you choose what type of To Do this is and let’s say you have to set a meeting. You can choose the priority. Is it high, low or medium? It’s going to assume it’s with this customer and job but you could change that if you need to. And there’s also a due date that you can set here. If you have a particular time that day you can also set that here as well. Now all you’re going to do at the bottom is type in the details. Set up meeting with Kristy about new job. Down here it says the status is active. You’ll see if it’s already been completed you can change the status to done or you can make it inactive but I’m going to leave it on active and click OK. And now you’re going to see that that To Do shows up in this list. What’s going to happen is once this To Do has been completed I can double click where it says Done, which will bring the Edit To Do window up and I can change the status to say Done and then click OK. And now you’ll see there’s a checkmark there indicating that To Do has been done. These To Do’s will also show up on the calendar function that we’ll talk about in a later module.

Notice there’s also reports down here, there were for each of these tabs. if you wanted to run some reports on To Do’s in this case.

The next tab over says Notes. This is where you can keep notes on different conversations you might have with your customer, maybe you actually do something you want to track a note for you can do that. And you can go to the Manage Notes at the bottom to add a new note. When you add a note it’s going to be the next one in the list. If there’s a particular one you’d like to pin, that means you want to keep it right here so that you can see it every time you click on that customer, you can actually do that by making sure you have the little pin right here.

The last tab are your sent emails. It used to be that if you wanted to send emails to this customer it didn’t track those emails. You could send things through QuickBooks, like an invoice, you could email it over for example, but you had no way to track your sent email and now you do. You can also go on to the bottom and manage your emails here. You can see that if you had some you could remove different ones if you wanted to but they will automatically show up there once you actually email those particular transactions.

I want to go ahead and stop the video right here. There is a part two to this. we’ve got a few more things we want to look at. I’m going to have you go ahead and go over to the second part, Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 2.

Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 2

Cindy: We’ve got a lot more to talk about when it comes to working with customers and jobs. This is part two. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and we’re going to go ahead and add a new customer.

The way we’re going to add a new customer is we’re going to the very top left where it says New Customer & Job. If we click the dropdown we can add a new customer.

The first thing it asks you is to put in the customer’s name. Remember we’re going to stay consistent with how the list is set up so I’m going to do last name, comma, first name and this will be Tom Allen. There is a place to put in the opening balance. The way this field is designed is as of the start date of your company file how money did this customer owe you? You could put in that total here and then put in that date. I personally don’t like to do that because even though my accounting would be correct I don’t have a way of going back and seeing that that was actually three different invoices that I had invoiced my customer for that was for a total of $1,000. I personally like to go back and put each invoice he still owed me for in and that way I can see everything going on when I look at a report.

The next thing is the address info. You’re going to be able to put in the company name. If Tom Allen had a company you could plug that in here. You could also go ahead and put his full name back in these fields here. Now a very common question is if I’ve got his name up here why do I need to put it back here? One of the things we’ll talk about towards the end of all these videos is the fact that you can do mail merges with Microsoft Word. It will actually pull from these fields here, not from here. This is just for this list. So that means you’ll want to go ahead and make sure that you have all of the fields filled in with the information that you might need if you’re ever going to be pulling some of this information. You can see you can put in his job title, phone, fax, email, website, and any of these fields you see here can represent any of these. So you just change it to the one you want it to represent.

You’ll notice that as you start typing his company name that it pulls that down here. So you’re going to want to go in and edit this information. This is the actual billing information that we’ll pull on to any correspondence you send out. Make sure this information is the way you want it. You can always come back in here and edit this if you need to.

If you actually have an instance where you might have a customer say I want you to send the invoice to one place but send the physical items to another address over here you can actually change all of this, but typically you just want this part here.

The next tab on the left are your payment settings. A lot of these fields are just informational for you. For example, if you give your customers account numbers you have a place to plug that in here. You might want to give different customers different repayment terms. You’ll see there’s net 30 on the list, net 60, net 15, there’s due upon receipt. There’s also 1% and 2% to net 30. Just to tell you what these mean, let’s just use 2% to net 30. This means the customer’s invoice will be due in 30 days but if he pays you in 10 days he can take 2% off of the total of the invoice. It’s a way of getting your customers to pay you a little bit early.

Does this customer have a preferred delivery method? Do they like things emailed or mailed to them? Is there a preferred payment method as well? Do they typically pay you with Mastercard or cash? And this doesn’t mean that every time they pay you this way, it just means that they usually pay you this way. There is a place to put in your customer’s credit card information if they buy from you on a regular basis. That way you don’t have to keep asking for that information. I personally would never in a million years put any of this in here. It’s just safe for you to save this somewhere else if you need to keep it. A lot of companies still don’t keep this information anywhere. They just ask for it again every time the customer makes a purchase.

On the right you can set a credit limit. What would happen is if you tried to invoice your customer for more than they owed and it exceeded the credit limit it would pop up and just say to you this customer has exceeded the credit limit, would you still like to sell them something. And you can also set a price level. A lot of times what happens is if this is a commercial customer you give them a different price than maybe a residential customer.

You can also set up the online payments, and I mentioned this when we were going through the Preferences. If you’ve already set it up with Intuit then you can actually email this invoice over to the customer and then when they get it they can just click a button and pay you with a credit card or bank transfer right from there.

Back to the left the next tab over says Sales Tax Settings. When we talk about sales tax there’s a couple things that come into play and one of them is when you’re actually charging tax do you charge it to this customer, yes or no? You might have a customer who is a nonprofit organization where they are tax exempt, whereas another customer might have to pay sales tax. If they do pay sales tax which sales tax item or group do you charge them? And then if they have a resale number you can plug that in. Basically what that means is let’s say that I sell chairs in my store and my customer comes to me and buys chairs to put in his store to sell. He could have applied to the state for a resale exemption for sales tax and if he has that resale number I can plug it in here just in case I ever need it for some reason.

The next tab on the left is Additional Info. You can track things like the customer type. Notice they’re tracking commercial and residential customers. This would be whatever list you wanted to create. You can see you can add new. If you have sales reps in your organization you can add those. That way you can track which rep works with which customers. And on the right you’ll see a couple of fields that say Contract Number, Birthday and Spouse’s Name. Now these fields are not here automatically. You add those. What you do is you go down to Define Fields, you type in the name of the field that you want to create and check off if you want to see that field for customers, vendors and/or employees so that you don’t have to set it up three different times. Then you can actually add information into those fields.

The last tab on the left is Job Info. Now in this case we’re just setting up a customer but if we were setting up a job we could put in information like the description of the job, the type of job, maybe the status of the job, a start date, projected end date, and an actual end date.

That’s the information you need to set up when you’re setting up a customer. I’m going to click OK and you’ll now see your customer in the list. Now you’ll notice that it put Tom Allen at the very top of the list, not alphabetical. All I have to do is click the word Name at the top of the column there and that will re-sort the list.

Now let me show you real quick how to add a job for Tom Allen. As long as I’m clicked on Tom Allen I can go back up here where it says New Customer & Job and add a job. I’m going to call this job Kitchen Remodel. You’ll notice that it pulled in all of the information from my customer. Unless I need to change any of that all I have to do is click OK and now you’ll see there’s a job for Tom Allen.

I wanted to also mention when you go back to the New Customer & Job option here you can add multiple customers and jobs. If you actually have some of this information already in Excel and you’ve got it set up with the same columns that you see here you can actually copy and paste this information. If you wanted to set up a new customer and job in here you can go down to the very bottom, type on the last line and then it will update this for you. And this is just a little time saving tip that it’s giving you but that’s another thing you can do if you want to add a lot of customers and jobs at the same time. I’m going to go ahead and close that. And that’s a quick way to work with your customers and your jobs.

I want to go ahead now and start talking a little bit about working with estimates. We’re going to head over to section two and we’ll be talking about setting up estimates and using these customers and jobs that we just created.

Estimates – Part 1

Cindy: We’re working in module four where we’re talking about customer and jobs. We’ve already looked at section one where I showed you how to set up customers and jobs. Now we’re going to start using some of that information and we’re going to start using them by creating estimates. A prime example of an estimate is in a construction company they will give you a quote or an estimate on what a job is potentially going to cost, and this is a great feature because you can actually take those estimates and turn them into invoices and get paid and then put the money in the bank further down the line. Not all companies use the estimate feature. If you don’t use this feature then you can skip this and go straight to invoicing, but this is the first part of creating estimates. There is a part two to this. Make sure you watch both parts so that you get a full view of how estimates work. Let’s flip over to QuickBooks and we’ll create our first estimate.

You’ll notice here that we are still in our customer center and I want to leave it open. I’m just going to use the Open Windows list here and click back on Home.

We’re getting ready now to talk about the entire accounts receivable section, which is all of this right here in the middle of your Home screen. If you notice the first one here says Estimates. Before I click on that I want to point out one quick thing. You’ll notice that purchase orders and estimates are on the same line. And the reason for that is because these are both considered non-posting. You can actually create an estimate all day long but if a customer never asks you to do the work and you never do anything with the estimate it just sits there and it doesn’t affect your books really in any way. You would have to run specific estimate reports to see what’s going on with those estimates. Like I mentioned also if your company doesn’t use the estimate feature then you would just start with the invoice feature right here.

I’m going to go ahead and click on Estimates so that we can start creating our first estimate.

I’m going to go ahead and maximize the screen here and the first thing I want to mention is you have this area on the right and you’ll see this with invoices as well. If you pull in a particular customer from here, which we’re going to do in a second, you will see some information about that customer and job here. You’ll see a summary, some recent transactions, some notes. If you don’t want to see this just use this arrow to hide the history and if you want to show it again for any reason you can pull it back up, but that will give you more room to work on on your screen.

The first thing it asks you at the top is who is your customer and your job. From the dropdown list I can pick my customer and my job. And one thing to remember is if you use the Job feature always click on the job and not the customer. If you click on the customer what will happen is later when you start running reports you will see Other and you won’t know what this is. Always click the job. Notice if I click Kitchen Remodel now it says my customer and job is Tom Allen’s Kitchen Remodel.

Now something really cool that you can do in QuickBooks is I would like to add a second job to Tom Allen. So instead of a kitchen remodel I’ve decided to do an estimate for a sunroom. Now I don’t have to go back to the customer center and set all this up. I can do it right from here. What I’m going to do is go ahead and just remove Kitchen Remodel and I have to have the colon at the end of Tom Allen. I’m going to go ahead and put in Sunroom and now I’ve got Allen, comma, Tom, colon, Sunroom. And if you forget that it shows you right here, Customer, colon, Job.

Now once I leave the field by hitting the Tab or the Enter key it’s going to tell me Sunroom is not on the list and asks me if I would like to add it. I can do a quick add, which just puts it in this list, or I can go and do a full setup where I put in all that information about the customer address and all that stuff we went through earlier. Typically with a job just quick add it. Now if I look at my list I’ve got two jobs for Tom Allen.

The next thing I’m going to see is the Class list. Remember I told you that classes allow you to break up your company into smaller sections for reporting purposes. You don’t have to use this feature but if you do you want to use it consistently so that your reports are accurate. Let’s say in this case that it’s going to be a remodel and then notice over here is the template that’s being used currently for the estimate. Now I can change the templates for each individual estimate if I want to. I’m going to leave it right now on the one that’s there. We will talk about templates in a later module and I’ll show you how to create new ones or to edit some existing ones.

The next thing you see is the date of the transaction. You can put any date you want here. It does not have to be the date that pulls in. Remember it’s going to pull the current date automatically if you’ve changed that option in the Preferences that we talked about.

The next thing is the estimate number. It’s numbering it sequentially. All items in QuickBooks that are numbered start with the number one. Checks, for example, invoices, in this case estimates. It will number the next one sequentially unless you happen to change it. You can make this number anything you want. You could even use the letters in the alphabet if you’d like and it will number the next one sequentially.

This is the name and address that we had typed in for our customer. If you happen to be here and you say, “You know he’s really at P.O. 125”, you can change it here and what will happen is when you’re totally finished and you save this it will go ahead and pop up and ask you if you’d like to save it permanently in their record.

The next thing I want to point out down here is where it says Item. You have to actually click there to see this dropdown menu. Now we’re going to talk about items in a later module because items are things that you actually sell your customer or sometimes you buy items, but these are the line items that would actually go on this estimate. When you’re looking at this list sometimes items can be services you provide. If I scroll down the list sometimes they can be actual inventory parts, they can be what we call noninventory, they can be assets, you can kind of see the list here. We’ll go through later when we talk about items and really look at this, but right now let’s just pick a couple of them from the list.

I’m going to pick Framing and you’ll notice that it brought in the description, Framing Labor. I can type over this all day long if I wanted to and this will also word wrap if I have a lot to say.

I’m going to put in the quantity. We’re going to say there’s ten of these and the cost it brought it in is $55 because that was set up in the actual item. Now let’s say for whatever reason I’m going to sell these to him for $50, maybe it’s a new customer and I’m trying to get his business, and I wanted to just mention the unit of measurement that it skipped over. You’ll notice it’s not available right now. When you set up an item if you set up the unit of measurement that means that you can say this is something I sell by the foot, the yard, the case, and this would be a dropdown list where you could pick that from the list.

Now we’re over in the markup column and I just wanted to show you that you can mark an item up a dollar amount or a percentage. I’m going to go ahead and say 30% of this one. Notice I typed the percent sign in. And if I tab through it it will do the calculation for me automatically.

The last column here where it says Non, that means that this customer charges sales tax. That means that I charge sales tax but this particular item is not subject to sales tax. Typically if it’s a service you provide it’s not, but a physical item it is.

I want to put one more item in here that is a physical part because I want to show you how to mark something up a dollar amount as well. I’m going to go ahead and there are some wooden doors in here and I’ll go ahead and pick the exterior wooden door. And I’m going to say a quantity of two of these and I’ll just leave the price it pulled in.

Now if you notice this time the markup is a negative number and it’s a percentage automatically. I’m going to type over that but the reason it pulled that is because when the item was set up they put in the setup that typically they have a particular price they buy it for and a particular price they sell it for and that way it figured out the markup. But I’m just going to mark it up $1,000. Notice I’m not putting the percent sign this time, just the 1,000 and it will calculate for me.

I can put in as many line items as I like. This is not the bottom of it. It will keep going on forever.

That’s a quick way to go ahead and set up a basic estimate. What I’d like to do now is go ahead and talk to you a little bit about some of the things that you see at the top here. And in order to do that I’d like to stop the video here and go ahead and go into the Estimates – Part 2 to finish this up. I’ll see you shortly.

Estimates – Part 2

Cindy: Welcome back. We’re in module four, Working with Customers & Jobs. We’ve been talking about estimates and I want to go ahead and continue where we left off. This is actually part two of working with estimates. Let’s go ahead and flip to QuickBooks and we’ll keep going.

Now that you know how to enter your line items in your estimate let’s talk about the options at the top of the screen. You’ll notice there are several different tabs and we’ll start with the main tab.

The first option that you’re going to see here has to do with finding estimates. You’re going to find that everything in QuickBooks is in date order. Let’s say you were looking for a particular estimate and you couldn’t find it. You could use your arrows that take you left or right to look for the next or previous estimate. If you can’t find it that way use this Find option right here, which lets you put in some criteria so you can search a little bit easier. If you knew the customer and job you could plug that, if maybe you had a particular date range you knew you created it you might look that way, you could look for estimate number or amount. This is only going to look for estimates. It’s not going to look in all of QuickBooks for a date range or an amount of money. It’s just for estimates. I’ll go ahead and cancel that one.

The next option is to create a new estimate, which would actually save the one you’re on as well. And if you look at the very bottom right hand side of your screen you’ll notice there’s an option that says Save & New. That’s the exact same option.

The next one over is an option where you can save your work. If this is taking you awhile and you just want to make sure you don’t lose it you can hit the Save option. But I want to show you that you can also save this as a PDF. Maybe you need to send it to someone and you need it in that PDF format you can do that.

The next one says Delete. This is how you would delete this entire transaction.

You can also create a copy. What if your customer asked you to create two estimates and maybe one had a little something that was different? Instead of redoing the whole thing just make a copy and then make those few changes.

The next one is the option to memorize this. We’re going to be talking about this in a later module but basically what it allows you to do is memorize this so that you can pull it up again at any time.

You can also mark a transaction as inactive. Basically what that does is QuickBooks is going to keep a record of all of your estimates but if you don’t want this one to show up in reports and things like that you can mark it as inactive and then when you’re ready you can activate it again.

Moving over to the right the next one is Print. This is where you would go to print this estimate or to preview this. and I want to show you what it’s going to look like if you preview it. Right now it’s very plain. You would want to come in and customize this if you’re going to send a lot of estimates out. Notice I can click to zoom in a little bit. But you’ll see that it has your company name and address, it has the name of the customer and their address, you’re going to see it says Estimate, it’s got some information on the right, the name of the project or the job, and then you’ll see a description, quantity, unit of measurement, cost, and total. The first thing I want to point out is it does not show the name of the item, which is typically the first column. That’s because your customer is going to see the description of the item but you can name your items anything you want. That’s more for internal use. Notice also they don’t see the markup. So that column is hidden as well. At the bottom they see subtotal, sales tax and total. And of course you can customize this to look any way you like. I’m going to go ahead and hit Close at the top and that’ll take me back to my estimate.

You can also under Print save this as a PDF again. And you can also do a mail merge with Microsoft Word where you can actually create an envelope. If I click on that and make sure I have the correct envelope size chosen and then clicked OK it’s going to do that mail merge. You have to have Microsoft Word in your computer in order to be able to do this. You’ll see it popped up Word down here at the bottom. I can click on it and actually pull up the envelope options. And then if I don’t need to change those I hit Cancel and there’s my envelope right there that I can print. I’m going to go ahead and save No right now because I don’t actually want to print that.

The next thing you can do is you can actually email this estimate to your customer. You can see right here you can email the estimate or the batch and I want to tell you what the batch is. Right here is a checkbox that says Email later. If I set up several different estimates for this customer and I check each one of these then when I’m ready I can email the batch over and it will email all the ones that have Email later checked.

I can also attach a file. If I want to attach a file all I have to do is hit Attach File and you see that option before where you can go through and choose a file on your computer or if you wanted to pull one over that’s in Outlook, any way you’d like to attach you can.

You can also create an invoice straight from here. Now chances are you’re not going to be on this screen when you’re ready to do that but you can if you want to. And let me just mention the Start Project. Intuit sells a product called Mavenlink which is more like a project management type software. They do give you a free 30 day free trial. So if you wanted to try it you could click here and it would walk you through setting it up. It is not free, like I said. You do have to purchase it after that 30 days.

Let’s go over to the next tab which says Formatting. We’re going to be talking about these templates I mentioned earlier right here in a later module but this is where you would go to actually work with those templates if you want to customize them. Here’s your spellcheck. You also can insert a line, delete a line or copy a line. Whichever line you’re clicked on is the one you insert a line above it, you can delete or copy. And this has more to do with customizing your template.

The tab that says Send/Ship, this is where you can do some of the mail merge options with Microsoft Word. And then you have some reports that are related specifically to estimates here. You can run a quick report, you can do a transaction history, estimate by job, estimate versus actual, or an item price list. And that’s going to give you most of your options there. Most of the time you’ll stay under the main tab.

A couple of other things I want to mention if you look at the bottom of your screen. You can actually see the subtotal, there’s the markup, if there was any sales tax and then the total at the very bottom. Over on the left you can also add a customer message. You may say something like “Please sign and date this proposal”, you might say something like “Thank you for your business”, there’s different options there. And also a little place for a memo that the customer will not see, that is just for you to see, and then also the customer tax code.

And that’s pretty much what you’re going to see on an estimate.

I’m going to go ahead and hit Save & Close at the bottom here and because I changed Tom Allen’s P.O. Box earlier it’s asking me would I like to change this permanently in his record. I’ll just say Yes and now that has changed.

That’s how you’re going to go through and actually set up estimates for customers and jobs.

Once you’ve created the estimate you’re going to sit back and when the customer says do the work you’ll want to go through and create an invoice and that’s where we’re going to start with the next video. I’m going to have you go ahead and go over to section three, Invoicing from Estimates, and we’ll look at how all this invoicing works.

Invoicing from Estimates – Part 1

Cindy: Now that you’ve actually got your estimates set up in QuickBooks if the customer calls and says go ahead and start the work you’re going to want to get paid for some of the work you’ve done and you’re going to be able to create invoices directly from those estimates that you’ve already created. I want to show you how to go ahead and create an invoice directly from estimates. There are two parts to this video so make sure you watch both parts so that you understand the full concept of how this works.

Once you’re ready to create that invoice go ahead and follow the flow chart and click on Create Invoices. You’ll notice that the invoice screen looks almost identical to the Estimates screen with a few exceptions. The first thing I’m going to do is come over to the right and go ahead and hide the history so that I have more room to work on. And then I’m going to pull in my customer and my job. Remember this is the Sunroom that we’re working on for Tom Allen.

Now this window here is going to appear and this is the Available Estimates window. What it’s doing is listing all of the estimates for Tom Allen Sunroom that we’ve not invoiced everything from. Even if there’s a penny left it’s going to show up on this list. I’m going to choose the one I’d like to pull in and click OK.

Now the next thing it’s going to ask me is do you want to pull in an invoice for the entire estimate, a 100% of it, maybe you want to create an invoice for a percentage of the entire estimate, or you can pull in selected items or different percentages. Let me just show you the bottom one and then I’m going to go back and make it 30%. I’ll just choose the bottom one and click OK. These are the items that are on the estimate and you have the ability to say I want to pull in two of these and one of these, or you might pull in a certain percentage of each one. There’s just all kinds of ways you can pull in whatever it is you want to pull from that estimate onto this invoice. I’m going to cancel that though and just to show you this because it still has Tom Allen Sunroom here and I cancelled. I need to go to the bottom and hit Clear, then I can pull it in again. I’m going to choose Tom Allen Sunroom, choose the estimate I’d like to pull from and then I’m going to pick the middle one and just put in 30. Now it knows 30%. You can type it or not here. It doesn’t matter. I’m just going to click OK and now you’ll see it’s pulled in 30% of my estimate. When you look over at the quantity you’ll see it pulled three of the framing and it pulled 0.6 of the wood door.

If you wanted to add something to this, maybe a shipping charge or a delivery charge, let’s see if they have one in the list that we can use. If I go down the list and look at this I believe that they do have one close to the bottom here. And they actually have a delivery charge. And I want to charge them just $25. I’ll just say quantity of one and the rate is $25. You can add as many line items as you want to this. This does not affect the estimate in any way.

Now a couple things I just want you to notice. First of all a lot of this you’ll be very familiar with from working with the estimates. We talked a little bit about the main tab, how you have a Find feature here. If I’m looking for a particular invoice and I can’t find it I can use the arrows to search next or previous and I can also use the Find feature to go through and put in some criteria that I might know in order to help me find that particular invoice.

New is the same thing as Save & New down here at the bottom. I’ve also got my Save option where I can save this as a PDF if I want or just save this so that I don’t lose my work. I can delete this invoice, create a copy, I can also memorize it. We also talked a little bit about mark as pending. Remember that if I want to keep this invoice in here but maybe I’m not quite ready for it to show up on my reports for whatever reason I can mark it as pending and come back later and then take that option off.

I can print this. Let me go ahead and show a preview of what this is going to look like. And you can see right now that it’s very basic. You can see that I have my company name and address, I’ve got the word Invoice at the top, there’s a place of the bill to and the ship to. Obviously if we’re not shipping anything we can go take this out. We’ll talk about customizing this in a later module. And then you can see it has all the information at the bottom. The sales tax, if there were any payments already made and a balance due at the bottom. I’m going to go ahead and close that.

I can also choose to print this later or email this later. We talked earlier about email later means that if you have several different ones you’ve created you can send them all as a batch. Well you can do the same thing with printing. If you actually create several invoices and you want to print them all at the same time you can choose the Print Later option right up here.

You can attach a file to this. maybe you have something from your vendor that you want to attach. You’d be able to do that.

And I want to talk real quick about Add Time/Cost and what this means. If you have any expenses that you had incurred related to this particular customer and you want to at some point pull those all in and invoice the customer you can do that. Now we don’t have any in here currently but let me just pull up this screen so you can see what it looks like.

I’m going to be able to keep track of any time I incurred, any expenses, any mileage, or any items. If I wanted to pull in anything that was under any of these tabs I’d just check it off and click OK and it will actually pull it into this window and that way I don’t have to write this in my little book and remember it and come type it in. It’s a real big pain to do that. So this is a great little feature if you have expenses that you need to turn around and invoice your customer for to get reimbursed.

You can also apply any credits. If you’d already created a credit memo towards this invoice this is a place where you can go to apply those credits. And let me just mention the progress. We don’t really have too much of a progress to look at right now but if we had actually already invoiced several of these from that estimate, if we had actually received a payment, maybe made a deposit then we can actually kind of track that.

You could receive payment right from here. Chances are at this point though you don’t have a payment. And even if you do you might not be on this screen when you’re ready to actually receive payments so you can do that from the Home screen as well.

You can also create a batch. If there are multiple customers that are going to all chip in and pay this one invoice then you can actually choose to create a batch option and it will send an invoice to multiple customers and then they can each pay their part.

You can also create a refund or a credit at this point for this particular invoice.

Let’s go up and look at some of the options under the Formatting tab. One of the things we’re able to do is we’re able to come over to the templates that you see right here and we’re able to customize these or create a new one. And this is where we would go to work on some of those options. Here’s your Spellcheck. Here’s where you can insert a line, delete a line or copy a line. And then here’s some more of the customize options for your template.

Now under the Send/Ship there’s a couple of new things here. If you have to ship physical items to your customer or to a job site or somewhere then that means that you’re going to have to go and schedule a pickup with FedEx, UPS or the United States Postal Service. Typically you would get out of QuickBooks and go to the internet and pull up your account with any of these but you don’t have to do that. You can do it right from here. Notice I can go ahead and schedule my FedEx pickup, I can go ahead for the UPS and schedule the UPS pickup or for the Postal Service as well. It’s going to basically take you to the FedEx website, you sign in and then you’ll be able to take care of all of these options. That’s a pretty cool feature you can do from within QuickBooks.

We do have some more mail merge options right over here. And then the last one, these are some reports that have to do with this particular invoice. You’ll notice there’s a quick report you can run, you can look at a transaction history or a journal. The transaction history is actually going to list all the transactions so you can see any payments have been made towards this, you can see if it’s linked to anything. And then when you look at the transaction journal here it’s going to show basically the same information just in a timeline fashion.

You can view any open invoices, look at your sales by customer detail and also average days to pay summary.

That’s going to give you a quick overview of how the invoicing works right here. What I want to do is go ahead and stop the video here. We’re going to go to part two and we’re going to continue pulling everything off of that estimate into some invoicing and then we can look at some reports having to do with that a little bit later.

Invoicing from Estimates – Part 2

Cindy: We just created an invoice from our estimate and what we need to do now is go ahead and finish invoicing everything from that estimate and then look at a couple of reports that have to do with invoicing. Let’s go ahead and flip back over to QuickBooks and we’ll continue talking about invoicing from estimates. This is part two.

Now that we’ve completed the first invoice let’s go ahead and hit Save & New at the bottom and I want to go ahead and invoice the customer for the remaining amounts that were left on the estimate. The process would be that the customer has okayed the job, everything is good, we’ve completed it. Let’s go ahead and pull in Tom Allen Sunroom again. It’s going to pull up the available estimates. We’re going to choose the estimate that we’re going to pull from. We’re going to click OK and this time you’ll notice in the Progress Invoice window that the first one is a little bit different. Notice it says create an invoice for the remaining amounts of the estimate. We could also invoice for another 30% if we wanted to or selected items. We’re going to go ahead and invoice for the remaining amounts and click OK. You’ll notice now it brought in everything that was left on that estimate that we had not yet pulled into an invoice.

I’m going to go ahead and add a delivery charge to this as well. We’re going to say that it’s a quantity of one at $25 and that’s all I want to add to that particular invoice.

You’re familiar with everything up here so I’m not going to go through all that again. I’m just going to hit Save & Close at the bottom and now we have invoiced everything. If we happen to create another invoice and pull in the same customer and job it will not pull up that available estimate window again because there’s nothing left to pull in.

This window happened to be underneath so this is our customer center and I wanted to show you that if you’re clicked on your customer and in this case we’re on the sunroom here’s the estimate we created and there are both invoices we created. If I wanted to open any of these up I could just double click on them and go right to that particular transaction.

There are a couple of reports that I want you to be familiar with that have to do with customers. If you go to the menu and click on Reports, we’re going to be looking at all these different reports in a later module but right now I want you to look at the Customers & Receivables category and then in there we’re going to pull up the Open Invoices.

Open means these have not yet been paid. This is the report you would want to pull on Fridays when you’re looking to make some collection calls. When you’re looking down this list a couple things. Here’s Tom Allen Sunroom. You’ll see the two invoices that we just created. But a couple things just to be aware of when you’re looking at the open invoice report.

Let’s say that you see something like an invoice for $100 and then below it it said payment of $100 and the balance is zero. That would actually be wrong or I should say it shouldn’t show up on this report. That just means that there are some payment that’s not attached to that invoice. If they were then they wouldn’t show up on this report. You also might see just a payment by itself occasionally. That could be legitimate. Maybe a customer paid you ahead of time, but just make sure that there shouldn’t be an invoice in there to attach that payment to.

There’s one other report I want you to look at. When I go back to Reports, back to Customers & Receivables, there is a Customer Balance Detail report. And this is the one that shows the customer’s entire history. Here is our Tom Allen Sunroom again, but I want you to look at Kristy Abercrombie. She has three different jobs and notice they’re separated but they show up under her name. You can see there’s a couple of invoices, a payment, down here there’s a check, there’s a credit memo. So that’s the entire history of the customer.

Now let’s go ahead and go back to Home for a moment. And now we’ve completed the estimates and we’ve created two invoices and now we’re going to sit back and wait to get paid. And that’s the fun part, when we start getting money coming in the door.

What I’d like to do now is go ahead and wrap up this particular video on invoicing from estimates. This was part two. We need to go ahead now and talk about invoicing customers for products and services and then we’ll talk about receiving payments from customers.

Invoicing Customers for Products and Services

Cindy: We are all the way down now in module four to section four where I’m going to talk to you briefly about invoicing customers for products and services. This is really very similar to what we just went through, except we won’t be pulling any information from an estimate. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and create a real quick invoice to show you how this works.

If I want to just create an invoice and not pull from an estimate I’m just going to start with Create Invoices right here and I’m going to pull in a customer and a job. I’m going to go ahead and pull in Tom’s Sunroom again and let’s just say this is something that has nothing to do with that estimate we created. Now even if there was an estimate there and it asked us if we wanted to pull from that estimate we don’t have to. We can go ahead and just get out of that window and invoice for anything we like.

I’m just going to come down here and we’re going to invoice him for some blueprints. We’ll just say a quantity of two of these at $500 each and then that makes $1,000, which is nontaxable. And that’s really all I have to do here.

You’re familiar with everything else here. I’m going to go ahead and add a customer message down at the bottom. And then I’ll go ahead and Save & Close. And I want to make sure this shows up on our reports. If you notice the open invoices is still here and it says Refresh Needed. That basically means that when I click there it’s going to go ahead and update the report for me and you can see now that there are three invoices there for the sunroom.

And that’s really all there is to actually invoicing when you’re not pulling from an estimate. It’s not too much different from what we did the first time.

Let’s go ahead and wrap this one up and let’s move over to section five where we’re going to talk about receiving customer payments.

Receiving Customer Payments

Cindy: Now we get to the really fun stuff where we actually talk a little bit about receiving customer payments. It’s always great when we have money coming in the door. And I want to show you how to actually go ahead and do this the right way in QuickBooks so that you zero out your invoice and then we’ll talk after receiving customer payments about how you put the money in the bank. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and we’ll talk about receiving customer payments.

When you receive a payment from a customer you’re going to want to go ahead and enter it here where it says Receive Payments. The first thing it asks you in this window is who did you receive the money from and I’m going to pick Tom Allen Sunroom. And you’ll notice that once I do that a couple things happen. First of all it prepopulates all of the invoices that are still open for Tom down here at the bottom of the window. Also it tells me the total that the customer owes right up here.

What I’m going to do is plug in the amount of money that the customer paid. Let’s say that Tom paid $924.93. As soon as I do that you’ll notice that down at the bottom it checks off the very first one. It assumes all of the money was to pay the first one. If there was any remaining money it would be applied to the second one and so on and so forth. And you want to be really careful there because what if the customer had said they wanted to apply that money to the second one. Or maybe they said they want to pay half on one and half on the other. You can actually check off the ones the customer is paying and then way over to the right here you can type in the amount of money they’re paying towards that invoice. If you don’t pay particular attention to that what’ll happen is further down the line you and the customer will be having a meeting because you won’t have the same set of books on both sides. So pay a lot of attention to that.

The next thing you’ll notice is you have to put in the date of the payment. Let’s say that it was on the 23^rd of December. And then the next thing is how did the customer pay you? You’ll notice currently it says Reference Number. If I chose Cash it’ll say Reference Number. If I choose check it’ll Check Number. If I choose Credit or Debit you’re going to see this pop up. You do not need to enter this information unless you’ve signed up with the Intuit merchant services because what happens is if you type the card number in then it will run their card. But if you’re not signed up with the Intuit merchant services then this does you no good. Just X out of that and it’ll still stay on the debit or credit option so that you will know how the customer paid. You can choose the e-check option. Over here you’ve got different payment methods. You’ll see there’s Mastercard, Barter and PayPal. Make sure that you actually choose Barter if someone does barter this and that way you can actually zero the invoice.

The other thing is what if you need to add a new payment method? You would just click Add New Payment Method, type in the name of that payment method. Let’s say it’s Square in this case. And then we’ll go ahead and choose a payment type. In this case we’ll say Other and click OK and now what you’ll notice is that Square is on the list forever so that I can choose it for future payments.

A couple of other things just to be aware of. Up at the top you have a couple of tabs again and under the main tab you’ll know what a lot of these are already. Here’s your Find option right here. We can search through all the customer payments for specific ones we might be looking for. Here’s a way to create a new customer payment. Remember it’s going to save this one and create a new blank one for you. Here’s a way to delete that payment. And then you can print. You do have the ability to print the payment and just to show you what it’s going to look like I’ll preview this. And it’s just basically what they call a payment receipt and it looks like this. All right I’m going to hit Close at the top, get out of that.

You can also email that same payment if you wanted to. You can also attach a file. We’ve talked about that. And then you can also look up a customer and an invoice if you wanted to. Now the open ones are here but what if the one the customer said that they’re wanting to pay is not on this list. It might be that they’ve already paid it or you applied it incorrectly and you can go and search for a customer invoice this way and just see what’s going on.

You can also un-apply a payment. That basically just unchecks whatever was checked down here. And I’ll go ahead and check it back again.

You might also apply a discount or a credit. A lot of times a customer might have terms of something like 2% ten net 30. You would give a customer those terms if you want to get the customer to pay you a little bit earlier than they normally would. In that case you probably gave them a small discount for doing that and here’s where you could go and apply that discount or that credit.

You may have a situation where a customer has a returned check. Their check bounced and you need to record that. All you have to do is record it right here and it’ll set everything up the right way for you.

Obviously here is where Intuit can sell you the credit card processing if you want it to go check out all the features of those options.

Under the Reports tab there’s several different reports you can run and you can see those here. And then also under the Payments tab that’s where they have that credit card processing again if you wanted to check that out.

I do have a question for you though. Where is this payment going to go once I hit Save & Close at the bottom? Well let me show you where it’s going to go.

I’m going to go back to the Chart of Accounts for just a moment because I wanted to show you this account right here called Undeposited Funds.

If you look all the way to the right there’s a balance of $3,364.93 in that account. This is all of the payments you’ve received that you have not yet put in the bank. A good way to keep a check on yourself is if you know that everything has been deposited but yet this has money in it then you need to figure out what happened.

I’m going to go back to the Receive Payment window. So the question is where does the payment go and the money is going to go into Undeposited Funds.

Now I want to just show you something. I’m going to go ahead and hit Save & Close at the bottom and I’m going to save my transaction. I want to flip back over to a couple of these reports. So I’m going to go to Open Invoices. You’ll see now there’s only two that are there. And if I flip back to the Customer Balance Detail report you’ll see there are the three invoices and the payment that we just received.

Now let’s talk about something that we actually saw when we were in the Preferences. I’m going to go back up to Edit Preferences for a moment and when we looked at the Payments option on the left, Company Preferences I had mentioned this option right here, Use Undeposited Funds as default deposit to account. If I uncheck that and click OK I want to show you what happens when you’re on the Receive Payment window.

I’m going to go back to Home and I’m going to go back and pull up my Customer Center. That’s the easiest way to get back to that payment. This is Tom Allen Sunroom and I’m going to double click on that payment we received.

This is a little bit different now. Now I get a choice of where I’d like to deposit the money. Notice Undeposited Funds is still on the list but so are my bank accounts. If I knew this was the only payment that was going to be in this deposit I could skip the next step we’re going to talk about and just put it directly in the checking account and I’m done. But that’s not going to work if you have more than one payment in a single deposit. You want to make sure that your bank statement matches QuickBooks. If you have more than one payment that’s in a single deposit you still want to put each one in Undeposited Funds and then when we go to the next step where we talk about making our deposits that’s where you’re going to see those two be pulled into a single deposit. That’s going to be the difference right there. If this confuses you don’t even worry about it. Just put everything in Undeposited Funds.

I’m going to go ahead and hit Save & Close and if I’ve made a change I’ll save it. And I want to show you one more quick thing.

If I open up the invoice that we just paid you’re going to notice that it actually says that it was paid and it gives you the date that it was paid right here. Even if there’s one penny left it will not say Paid on this particular invoice. But this one is paid in full. I’m going to hit Save & Close at the bottom and that’s how you actually receive payments.

I want to go ahead now and flip over to the next section and show you how to make deposits.

Making Deposits

Cindy: Now that we’ve actually gone through and received some payments from our customers we can go ahead and make a deposit. I want to go through this section which is section six and talk to you about how to take that money that you’ve received for customer payments and actually put it into a deposit and actually have that show up in your checkbook register. Let’s flip over to QuickBooks and I will show you how to make a deposit.

When you’re ready to actually make a deposit what you’ll want to do is actually follow your flowchart all the way to the Record Deposits option right here. You’ll notice the little three that you see, indicates there are three sets of monies that are sitting Undeposited Funds right now waiting to be pulled into a deposit.

Now before I click on that I just want to talk for a moment about something that I see often that will cause you problems. A lot of times people will get to the step where they receive the payments over here and when they go to make a deposit they’ll actually go to the checkbook register and type it in. Here’s the problem with that.

Number one, if you do that the money sits in Undeposited Funds at this point and it just grows and grows and grows and you want that to be zero every single time you’ve actually deposited all of the money you’ve received. That’s the first thing. The next thing is if you go to the Check Register and you just try to type this in what’s going to happen is you’re going to type and the first thing it will ask you for here is a payee. If you had several different customers that had paid you you obviously couldn’t put all three on that one line. That’s not such a big deal. What would happen next is you would go over here where it says Deposit and put in the total, but here’s where the real problem is going to come in right here where you have to pick something from the Chart of Accounts. Most of the time what I see people do is they will pick one of their income accounts right here and you don’t want to do that because now you’re doubling that income. QuickBooks decided this was income at the time that you created the actual invoice itself. Here you will be doubling it if you tell it it’s income again. The other thing I see people do is they will also sometimes pick the Accounts Receivable account, which is right here, and that’s wrong because you’ve already been there, done that. It was Accounts Receivable when you created the invoice. There is no correct way to enter it in this window. You need to actually follow the flowchart all the way on the Home screen and choose the Record Deposits option right here.

This is a listing right here of all of the monies that you’ve collected that you haven’t yet deposited. A couple of ways you can view this window. You’ll notice right now I’m looking at all the types of monies I’ve received. I could look at just the debit card transactions or maybe just the cash and checks but typically I leave that on all types. You can also sort this list by payment method, by name, amount, whichever one of these you want to sort it by. Again I usually just leave that on payment method. There’s really no reason for me to have to change that.

When you go down this list you’ll want to check off the ones that are going in this particular deposit. If you’re going to have two of these and have a single deposit in the bank for $2,440 like you see here then after you check those two off you click OK and later you come back in and check this one off. Just make sure that your deposit total matches what actually was deposited into the bank. That way it’s easier to go ahead and reconcile. You’ll have a hard time if you put these in one at a time.

I’m going to go ahead and check all three in this case and click OK. And you’ll see that it populated all three of these into my deposit here.

A couple of quick things. First of all make sure you’re depositing to the correct bank account. Often when someone says to me “I know I made that deposit” they’ve put it in the wrong account. The other thing is make sure you have the correct date for your deposit and then it will put the word Deposit here automatically in the memo. You can change that if you need to say something particular.

When you’re looking down here at the three items that it brought in do not change this account right here because this is where the money actually came from. When we received the payment it went into Undeposited Funds. Now we’re pulling it out of Undeposited Funds so that we can actually save this in a moment and it will be in our checkbook.

You do have the ability to put a memo in here for each of these lines if you’d like to do that. You’ll see there’s a place for the check number if you forgot to put one in on the Receive Payment window or now maybe you want to put something else in that field you can. You have your class field here and then of course the amount over here.

You can also add something to this. If you happen, for example, to have a little bit of cash you wanted to throw in there then go ahead and put in whichever one of these customers you would want to use or if it’s just cash that you yourself put in here, you really don’t have to put anything in that particular field. You do have to fill in the From Account field though. That’s mandatory. Think about if you as the business owner put money into the business then it’s considered an owner contribution and that’s the one you’d want to pick here. What if it’s something like a rebate? Then you would go ahead and put it to the account that you used when you actually purchased the item to begin with. For example, if you purchased a new printer and let’s say from the dropdown list you have picked an expense account, maybe Office Expenses, then use that same account here so that it zeros it out. You can put as many items as you want here.

A couple things down at the bottom. You’ll notice that it says Cashback goes to. As a business you cannot get cashback when you go to the bank to make a deposit. But as a sole proprietor with a personal account you could. You would just pick the particular account that you want the cashback to go to. You would have the memo if you had one and the amount that you wanted to keep and then it would deduct it from this total over here.

Now a couple of quick things at the top I just want to point out. I want to point out that you have the ability to use your Next or Previous buttons to look through your deposits if you happen to be looking for a particular one. You could save this. You could also print this. And I want to show you the two versions that you would be able to print. Here’s a deposit slip. I’ll just go ahead and preview that for you. And you can see it looks just like this. However I think the one you’re going to want to use is going to be the Deposit Summary. And this is what the Deposit Summary looks like right here. You can actually just attach that and send it to the bank if you want, or keep it for your records.

The other thing I want to mention is if when you were in that first window where you checked off the payments you wanted to pull in and let’s say you checked off the wrong ones, go ahead and hit this Payments option right here and if you had some in there you could go and check off some that you didn’t automatically pull in. I pulled all three in and that’s why I have this window here. So I’ll go ahead and cancel that.

You can also look at a history for this deposit. This will actually show you all of the payments right here that are going to be in this deposit. And if you wanted to actually go to one of these you could actually just go directly to it and then you could edit this payment or if you wanted to just look at it and close it you could do that as well.

And the last thing is you have the ability to attach a file to this. This could be any file at all that you feel pertains to this deposit.

Notice the total because we’re going to see this in the register in the moment. The total is $3,364.93. I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and that actually completes that whole line all the way across.

Now let’s go and look in the Register and see if we see that deposit. And you’ll see there it is right there at the bottom.

Now the reason you see the blue line is because anything below it is postdated. Remember for the practice file it thinks today is December the 15^th. Notice a couple of other things. It says Split. That’s because there were three different transactions on that deposit. And then also notice the fact that there is no payee. Again that’s because there were three different payees and it couldn’t put them all in that one line right there.

And that’s really all you need to know. That’s how your deposits are going to work. Just remember, like I said, don’t type them in here. You want to actually follow the flowchart all the way to the very end so that everything goes to the correct accounts.

That’s how you’re going to make deposits in QuickBooks. Let’s go ahead now and go over into section seven and talk a little bit about how to create credit memos.

Creating Credit Memos

Cindy: We are all the way down now to section seven of module four and in this particular section I want to talk to you a little bit about creating credit memos. There are times when a customer may actually return an item that they’ve purchased and you need to either credit their account or possibly give them a refund. Sometimes you might want to create a credit memo just to sit on the customer’s account for future use. It’s going to work the same way no matter what the end result is. Let me go ahead and show you how to go to QuickBooks and set up those credit memos.

Whenever you need to create a credit memo or refund a customer you’re going to choose this option here that says Refunds & Credits.

The first thing you’ll want to do is go ahead and choose the customer and the job that you want to create the credit memo for, make sure you always click the job, and also choose the correct class. There are also different templates for credit memos. We’re going to talk in a later module about how to create new templates for invoices, credit memos, any kind of form and that’s where we’ll look at customizing that or creating a new one.

You want to go ahead and choose the date of the credit memo. I’ll just make it January the 7^th. And also you’ll notice that with credit memos it’s just like any other form in QuickBooks that has numbers. It will always start with number one and number sequentially. If you don’t like this particular number you can type whatever number you want and the next one will be numbered the next number when you get around to creating that credit memo.

It should have brought in the customer information here and now let’s go down and talk about the items.

I’m going to click on the first line there and drop down my items list. Think about it this way. If a customer returns a wooden door and you had actually sold them that wood door originally and it took it out of inventory, if they bring it back you want to put it back into your inventory and that’s why you would pick the exact same item that they bought to begin with. Now in this case they’re returning the wood door and we can type any description we want right here. If we want to put in Return or anything we want that’s certainly okay. We’re going to put in the quantity. And then let’s go ahead and put in the rate of $540 and notice that it’s also going to return the sales tax. And you want to make sure it does that because if you charge sales tax to begin with make sure that the customer gets their sales tax back as well and that’ll keep that side of things going correctly.

You can also just create a credit memo that sits on their account. So let’s say that they didn’t want to return the wood door. They just wanted to have a credit because maybe you had told them that they were only going to be charged for five hours of framing but yet you charged them for ten hours. There’s many different scenarios here. Just remember if it’s inventory that you sold you want to put it back in the inventory, if not you can just pick any of these other items on the list.

A couple things down at the bottom. You’ll notice this is the tax rate that’s going to be returned. And it also shows you the remaining credit memo amount down here at the bottom.

On the left you have the ability to add a customer message. You’ve also got a place for a memo and it does have the customer tax code at the bottom.

Back up at the top I don’t think any of this is new but here’s your Find options we’ve talked about several times now. Here’s your New option if you wanted to save this credit memo and create a new one. Here’s your Save option where you can actually save this credit memo or refund or save it as a PDF if you prefer. Here’s where you can delete this, create a copy. We can memorize it, mark it as pending or any of these other things that we’ve already talked about.

Now here’s a couple things that are new that are pertinent just to credit memos. We can actually use this credit to give our customer a refund. If the customer has paid in full then you would want to give them a refund. You could also use this credit to apply to an invoice.

Let me go ahead and show you if you give them a refund what the screen looks like here. Notice it pops up and says Issue a refund. It’s got a refund is due to, so it has our customer and job. It has the refund amount. It has the date. And over here it’s assuming you want to refund them with a check but I could refund them with cash or if I want to put it back on their credit card, you can see any of those choices. And it does give you the ending balance in your bank account at this particular moment so you’ll know that you have enough money to refund it. And then you can see it has a memo down here and that’s pretty much all you need to do.

Now what would happen here is if I left this on check and I click OK this is actually going to put a transaction in the checkbook register. I’m going to go ahead and click OK and notice it says Refunded right here. And I’m going to Save & Close and let’s go into the check register and see what it looks like.

I’m going to use my checking and now what you want to do is look for that particular transaction. Now what we want to do is look on December the 15^th here and we’re going to go ahead and look all the way down this list and see if we see our refund and there it is right there. It’s for Tom Allen Sunroom and it’s already deducted it from the register. And notice the account that it shows, Accounts Receivable. Don’t change that. That’s where it should automatically be. Now if you had a check number that you wanted to put here you can just type over that To Print and put whatever check number you wanted to and just make sure record it when you’re done.

And that’s pretty much how that’s going to work. Now let me just go back and show you one more thing. I’m going to go back to Home. If when I went to Refunds & Credits I had filled out this entire screen and I did not choose one of these what would happen is when I went down to Save & Close at the bottom it would automatically pop up and ask me which one of these I wanted to use. It would actually have one additional choice on the list. It would ask me if I wanted to leave this credit memo on their account for future use.

And that’s pretty much all you need to do when you’re creating a credit memo.

I’m going to go ahead and close this window and go back to the Home screen.

The next thing I want to talk to you about is over in section eight, how to create customer statements.

Creating Customer Statements

Cindy: We’ve made it all the way down to section eight where we’re going to talk about creating customer statements. Some businesses like to send a statement to their customers at the end of the month. A statement basically lets the customer know that they started the month owing X amount of money, then it’ll show all the transactions that happened during the current month and then it’ll tell the customer what they owe at the very bottom.

Statements are really easy to create in QuickBooks. It’s an option. You don’t have to do this but it is a nice, gentle reminder to your customer that they owe you money, or sometimes it might be just to show the customer that they’ve paid up. Let me go ahead and show you how to create statements in QuickBooks.

To create a statement in QuickBooks you’re going to use the Statements button right here.

Typically when you send a statement you want to date it for the last day of the month and that way you capture all the transactions from the beginning of that month to the end of that month. We’re just going to go ahead and change all this to December 1 through December 31 and then you’ll notice the statement date is the end of the month.

You do have a couple of choices here for customers, for example. You can choose all the customers, you can send a statement to multiple. If you choose multiple it let’s you choose the ones you’d like to send. You can also send this to one customer in particular. You can just pick that one customer from the list. You can choose customers of a particular type. When you set up your customers you might have had residential or commercial customers and you can choose whichever ones you want there. Or only people who have a preferred send method. Let’s go ahead and choose All Customers.

Now over on the right these are some template options at the top. There are different templates available for statements and you can choose the one that’s here customize and create your own. You can choose to send a statement to each customer or to each customer and a separate one for each job.

There’s a couple of checkboxes here that you might want to look at. It might be that you want to send statements to only customers in a particular zip code. It could be down here that you don’t want to send customers that have a zero balance a statement or maybe if they owe you less than a dollar or if they didn’t have any activity. You can kind of see the list right there.

All you have to do when you’re finished checking off all of these options is just hit the Preview real quick just to make sure that it looks okay. And then this is what a statement actually looks like. Let’s see if I can zoom in a little more here.

You can see that this is for Tom Allen and it has the balance forward at the end of November, which was zero, and then you can see all of the invoices for his sunroom. There was a check and then also a payment there. And you can see at the bottom how much Tom owes. Now it also tells you how much the customer owes for each of these categories, 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60, 61 to 90. You can kind of see that.

And that’s all a statement is. You just print this out and send those to your customer.

Once you’re done you just hit Close and you don’t have to do this again until the next month. And that’s how statements work.

Let’s go ahead and go over to the last section in this module and talk a little bit about how the income tracker works before we wrap up module four.

Income Tracker

Cindy: We’re down on the last section of module four now and this is going to be section nine. I want to show you real quick how the Income Tracker works in QuickBooks. When you’re talking about customers you have the ability to see a screen that lists all of your customers and their open transactions, overdue transactions, things like that on one screen, and then you can actually go in and maybe receive payments or something similar with multiple customers again all on one screen. Let me flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show you how to get to the Income Tracker and I’ll show you how it also works.

In order to access the Income Tracker you’re going to have to use the menu. I’m going to go up to the menu and click on Customers and then you’ll notice Income Tracker right here.

The first thing I want you to notice when you’re looking at this list is that you can see at the top a total for all of your estimates that you still have outstanding. You’re going to be able to see a total of anything you have as far as time and expenses, open invoices, if you have any overdue and any that were paid in the last 30 days.

Now you can customize these options a little bit by coming up to the little gear icon that you see. And if you don’t want to see Estimates, for example, or you don’t want to see Time & Expenses you can uncheck those. I’ll uncheck Estimates and click OK and now notice that’s not on the list here. Again to turn that back on I would just do the same thing and go back and check Estimates.

Looking down the list you’ll see it’s a list of your customers, you’ll see the type of transaction and you can just see all the information about the transaction all the way across.

A couple things you’re going to be able to do, if you notice I’m on an invoice currently and if I go all the way over here where it says Action I can go down and receive a payment, print that row or email that row. A really good way to use this screen is if you received a lot of payments today you can actually just go down and click on all the ones that you need to go ahead and use the Receive Payment option for and then it takes you right to that payment window and it’s a quick way just to put a whole bunch of them in all at once.

If you happen to be on an estimate as an example down here your options will be a tad different. You’ll be able to convert it to an invoice, mark it as inactive, print the row, or email the row. So depending on what type of transaction it is you’re going to have different choices.

The other thing you can do is you can do some batch actions like you see down here at the bottom. Whichever customers you have selected, and you can go down the list and check or uncheck different ones here, but you can actually create invoices for all of these as a batch or send a batch email. That’s really a better example.

Also where it says Manage Transactions here you’re going to be able to go in for each of these and create an estimate, an invoice, any of those options that you see as well.

So it’s just a way of seeing all of your transactions in one window and that way if you wanted to go through and quickly just receive payments or one of those features we saw it’s a little easier to do when you see everything in one window very similar to an Excel spreadsheet. And that’s all the Income Tracker is. You can actually close it with the X at the top and that takes you back to the Home screen in this particular case.

Well that’s going to go ahead and wrap up module four where we’ve been talking about working with customers and jobs. Take a few moments and make sure you’re okay with everything and then I want you to head over to module five and we’re going to talk about working with vendors.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education.Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.