How to Set Up Customers and Jobs in QuickBooks Pro 2017 Part 1
During this QuickBooks Pro 2017 tutorial video, we will take a look at the customer center and start creating new customers.
Video Transcript
Hey there. Welcome back. We’ve made it all the way down now to module 4 where we’re going to talk in this module about working with customers and jobs for those customers. Remember that customers are people that buy from you. Some customers have different jobs that you might work on on a regular basis. That’s where we get the terminology Customers and Jobs and QuickBooks lets you set up both of those.
This is section 1 and this is part 1. So make sure you watch both parts so you know how to set these up properly. Let’s go ahead and flip over QuickBooks and start looking at customers.
First of all let me show you how to get to the Customer Center which is where you’ll see a list of all your customers. Remember there’s several ways to do it. This is probably the most common way by clicking right here on Customers and this is what they call the Customer Center. Now we don’t have any customers set up in ours because it’s a brand new company file. So here’s what I’d like to do.
I mentioned to you way back that you do have some sample files that you can go into if you want to see how something should be set up. We’re going to actually close the company file we created here. So we’ll Close Company/Logoff and we’re actually going to open one of those sample files. We’re going to open the sample_product-based business. This particular one happens to be a construction company called Rock Castle Construction. And when you open a sample file it does give you a sample date. And they’re setting this one at 12/15 of 2021.
Now when we open this up you’re going to see that all of the settings we had set earlier, that was for a different company file so I’m going to have to set those again if I want them in this company file.
So just a quick review. I’m going to move the icon bar to the top. That was under View, Top Icon Bar. The next thing I’ll do under View is I’ll go back to the Open Windows list. And now let’s just maximize this window right in here.
Now so there’s a couple of preferences I’m going to turn on because if not I’m going to end up screwing this up as we go along. So I’m going to go back to the Edit and choose Preferences here and the big one that gets me every time is under General. I’m going to choose Press Enter to move between the fields. There you go. Now it’ll work a little bit better for us.
Let’s go ahead and look at the Customer Center in the practice file.
You’ll notice on the left you have a list of all of your customers. If you can’t see the list go ahead and expand the column a little wider so you can see the full name in this particular list. Notice it shows you the customer and these are jobs for that customer. Also the balance that’s due for the entire customer or per job.
This column over here where it says Attachment, notice the little paperclip. You can actually double click and attach a file to this customer. Maybe you had a Word document or an Excel file. You can go ahead and attach it here so you don’t have to get out of QuickBooks and go search for it when you need it.
Notice I’m looking at all the customers that are active but I could look at just the ones with open balances, just at the overdue ones, or I could look at all the customers total. I’m going to click on All Customers for a moment because I want to show you one quick thing.
We talked back in the previous module about how to make an account in the Chart of Accounts inactive. I had mentioned you could do that. This is a way to make a customer inactive right here. See the column with the X? Let’s say that this customer I haven’t seen in a very long time. I can just put that X next to that customer and it will ask me am I sure I want to make that customer inactive. Notice the X now meaning he’s inactive. So when I’m looking at just active customers he will not show up on the list.
If you want to activate him again you could go back, do it the opposite. Just choose All Customers, click on the X and now it will say Would you like to activate that customer and all the subs? So that’s how that’s going to work. I’ll just go put it back on Active Customers.
The customer that you’re clicked on you’ll notice over on the right is their information. Their address, their phone number, email, things like that. Notice the email is a link. So if you clicked there you would actually go and be able to send an email to this particular customer. You also have a note over here that is pinned. That means that’s the important note. So we’ll talk a little bit about that shortly. And also notice there are some reports here you can run. Now these aren’t just for this customer. They’re for all customers.
Now if you notice you can actually make the bottom of the window a little bit smaller or if you need to pull it up you can do that too and that way you can see everything on the top or the bottom.
Several tabs at the bottom. The first one says Transactions. Those would be any transactions that have been created for this customer or job. Notice if I click on a job I only see the ones for that job versus if I’m on the customer I see the ones for that entire customer.
If I wanted to look at one of these transactions, let’s say this payment here, all I have to do is double click and go right to that particular transaction. Alright I’m going to close it up at the top.
You also have Contacts. So if you wanted to have an additional contact other than the customer, maybe someone in front office, maybe the partner, you could set that up. You can set up To Do’s. Those are things you have to take care of related to your particular customer. You can type Notes. So any time you have a conversation with your customer you may want to put some notes in.
And also you can look at Sent Email. In prior versions you could send emails but it didn’t keep a list of the emails you had actually sent out. Here it does, just so you’ll know.
Let’s go ahead and take a peek at the information you would need to set up if you’re going to set up a new customer. I’m just going to take Kristy for example and I’m going to double click. That’s just like going into Edit. Here you have the customer’s name and the current balance that they owe.
You’ll notice there are several tabs here. The first one being the Address Info. So that’s pretty self-explanatory. Then you have the Payment Settings. So we’re going to go through this in a second when we set up our customer. We’ve got Sales Tax Settings. So if you charge sales tax then this customer would fall under a particular tax bracket or may or may not be taxable and some additional info.
So why don’t I go ahead and hit Cancel here and let’s go ahead and create a new customer.
The way you create a new customer is you come up here where it says New Customer and Job and it says New Customer. The first thing you want to do is put in the customer’s name. Now in this list if you look at it they had last name, comma, first name. You’ll want to continue it the same way. I’m going to say this is Mr. Tom Allen.
And notice there’s a place to put an opening balance. Now this is here because as of the start date of your company file how much money did the customer owe you? You could plug in that figure. I don’t like to use that because I can’t tell that that $1,000 the customer owed me was actually for three separate invoices. So what I do is I leave that blank and I go and actually put those invoices in.
The first tab is the Address Info so I’m going to fill some of this in. We’ll say that Tom works for ABC Plumbing and notice it has a place for Mr. and Mrs. first name and last name. A very common question is if I have the name here why do I need to put the name here?
That’s because you’re going to learn in a later module that one of the features QuickBooks has is the ability to do mail merges with Microsoft Word. This is where it pulls from, these fields right here. It does not pull from this. So you do need to fill this in if you want to use some of this information when you’re creating a mail merge.
So we’re going to say this guy is the president. Now I can go down the list and put in phone, fax, email. You can see all the different things. If you want a field to represent something else notice you can choose it from the list. So you’ve got plenty of fields where you can fill in information.
You might have noticed as you were typing that it started bringing down some of that information. This is the billing information. You will need to click here and actually type this out the way you’d like it to appear when you actually send an invoice to your customer.
You also have the ability to set up a shipping address over here. That would mean if you have a customer that says ship the items to one address but send the bill somewhere else you could fill that in.
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Now let me go to the Payment Settings which is the next tab over. If you don’t have all of the information filled in in this address block or if it doesn’t recognize something it will pop up with this window and then you can edit the information this way. I’m just going to leave that postal code out for now and click OK.
Here I can give my customers an account number. You don’t have to do that but a lot of businesses do. Payment Terms. You can have different payment terms for each customer. So if you want this customer to be net 10, another to be net 30 you can certainly set it up that way.
Do they have a preferred delivery method? Does this customer like things emailed or mailed to them? And do they have a preferred payment method? Do they usually pay you with cash or do they usually barter? You see you have different choices here.
I would never ever, ever put this information in but this is designed to hold the customer’s credit card information. If you have a customer that asks you to keep their number on file and just charge it whenever then keep that somewhere else, not in here.
You can set a credit limit for your customers. What will happen is if you exceed the credit limit it will pop up and warn you but still let you sell them something else.
And you can also set a price level. So if you’ve decided that all of your commercial customers get a 10% discount you can set that up here. Also if you have customers that you want to be able to pay you with online payments you can go through and set up credit card and bank transfer information here.
Now we’re going to go to the Sales Tax Settings. Before we do let’s go ahead and stop the video here and I want you to go over to part 2 so we can continue talking about setting up our customers.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
