Setting Up Customers, Vendors, & Employees

Setting Up Customers

The screen above shows the Customer:Job list, including the Customer:Job pop up menu in the lower left hand corner.  This menu allow you to affect the status of the list and its items, such as New, Edit, Make Inactive, Delete, Use, and Print List. The Activities menu button provides access to activities that you can perform on that list's items, such as Receive Payments for customers or Enter Bills for vendors. Finally, the Reports menu button shows many of the reports that you can create for the list's items. Clicking on the New Customer button displays the following screen:

This screen is used to add new customers to your Customer:Job list and to change information about customers who are already on the list. Most of the fields should be obvious.  However, if you don't plan to set up separate jobs for this customer, enter job information on the Job Info tab. You should determine the opening balance and "as of" date for a customer. These two fields establish a correct accounts receivable balance as of the start date you choose. You should leave these fields blank if you are planning to set up one or more jobs for this customer. QuickBooks will calculate and track the overall balance for this customer from the balances you enter for the individual jobs.

While this should be obvious, we will point out that you must enter all historical transactions from the day after your start date through today. For example, if you wrote invoices to this customer between your start date and today, you must enter those invoices into your QuickBooks records. This gives QuickBooks the ability to provide full financial reports for your company for any period of time after your start date.

Type – Once you have assigned a customer type to each customer, you can create reports that provide useful information about the customers you serve. For example, if you have categorized your customers by market segment, you can create a separate sales report for each segment. For example, a building contractor might use customer types to record a client's market segment: residential, commercial, industrial, etc.

Preferred Send Method – You can choose how you want to send invoices, statements, or estimates to this customer, including e-mail or Fax.

Resale Number – Entering a number here indicates that you don't charge sales tax on items that a customer buys for resale.  However, be cautioned that this field is for information only; you will still need to suppress sales taxes in the ordering process.

Custom Fields - Custom fields let you add to the information that QuickBooks tracks about your customers, vendors, and employees and the items that you purchase and sell. You can also add your custom fields to sales and purchase forms. QuickBooks treats the information you enter into a custom field the same way it treats information entered into any other field.  If you memorize a transaction that has a custom field, QuickBooks memorizes what you entered in the field along with the other details of the transaction. If you export a list that contains data in custom fields, QuickBooks exports that data along with the other data from the list. The custom field screen is shown below:

QuickBooks handles jobs as a subset of the customer record. As you can see below, QuickBooks does not capture very much information about a job; only a few fields of data are available to save.

To add more than one job to a given customer, you need to choose “Add Job” from the customer menu screen as shown below.

 
Right Mouse Menus - When working with customer lists, as well as other lists, it is important to remember that right mouse clicking on a name of that list is a great shortcut to performing everyday tasks. Presented below is a screen shot of the resulting menu.

Setting Up Vendors

Setting up vendors is a similar process to setting up customers.  There is a similar look and feel to the screens and similar data fields, etc.  For example, you can establish a vendor type just like a customer type, you can set up custom field for vendors just like custom fields for customers, and the user menus work the same way, as well.

Setting Up Employees

Setting up a new employee is a different process than setting up a new customer or vendor in that QuickBooks launches a wizard to walk you through the entire employee set up process. The screens below demonstrate this wizard:

Notice that during this wizard process, QuickBooks provides links to discussions about each field.  Once you complete the set up wizard, the following screen is displayed, similar to the customer and vendor set up screens.

You can get a credit report on any customer, or prospective customer, selecting credit check from the Customer menu, and then select Get Credit Report.  At the Credit Check Services window, select the Existing Customer tab if the company you are checking is already in your customer list.  Otherwise, select the New Customer tab. Next select a company or enter the company name and state. Then select Get Credit Report and click Start.  If no matching company is found, make certain that the company name and the state in which it is located are both correct. If multiple possible matches are found, select the best match and click Continue. If a large number of companies is found, click Advanced Search and add additional criteria.  If the company you selected is not an exact match for a customer in your customer list, the information from the D&B database is displayed next to the information from your QuickBooks customer list.  Check "Update billing address in QuickBooks with information from D&B" if you want the D&B information to replace the QuickBooks information.  The information in QuickBooks will be saved in the customer notes area.  Pricing for this service is as follows:

With this service, credit reports are downloaded right into QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Letters – With QuickBooks Letters you can also use this feature to edit a set of prewritten, preformatted business letters in Microsoft Word using QuickBooks data. This allows you to send letters to customers or vendors such as collection letters, thank you notes, and more. To create a letter, use the QuickBooks Write Letters wizard, where you'll specify choices for letter types, lists of recipients, and other information. When you've made all the necessary selections, you'll leave the wizard and begin creating your letters in Word. As you work in Word, you can access a set of QuickBooks toolbars that will help you enter data fields in the letters you create. QuickBooks fields act as placeholders for the QuickBooks data extracted from your names lists.

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