 Adding Notes, Hiding, Merging Records and Deleting Customers

 

Adding Notes About Customers

Attention to detail. Follow-through. These are a couple of the things that keep customers coming back for more. Following up on promises or calling if you can’t make your meeting is good business. But sending reorder brochures after customers have made purchases can just make them mad. If you use another program for managing customer relationships, you can track these types of details there.

But if you prefer to use as few programs as possible, QuickBooks’ notes can help you stay in customers’ good graces by tracking personal info and customer to-do lists.

To add a note to a customer or job record, follow these steps:

1. In the Customers & Jobs tab on the left side of the Customer Center, select the customer or job to which you want to add a note.

The customer’s or job’s information appears in the right pane of the Customer Center.

2. In the right pane, click the Edit Notes button.

The Notepad window appears and displays all the notes you’ve added for the selected customer or job, with the insertion point at the beginning of the text box, ready for you to type.

To add a reminder of what you want to do for a customer and when, in the Notepad window, click New To Do. In the New To Do dialog box, type your reminder and choose a date in the “Remind me on” box, and then click OK. The to-do item shows up on the QuickBooks Reminder List on the date you picked. Of course, Quick- Books reminders work only if you open Quick- Books on that day and you remember to look at the Reminders List.

3. To keep track of when conversations happen, click Date Stamp before typing a note. If you’re adding a note about something that happened on a day other than today, you have to type in the date.  â•‰â•‰Merging Customer Records

4. Type the note you want to add. To add information somewhere other than the very beginning of the text field, first click to position the insertion point where you want it.

5. When you’ve added the note, click OK. QuickBooks adds the note to the Notes area in the Customer Information (or Job Information) pane on the right side of the Customer Center window.

Merging Customer Records

Suppose you remodeled buildings for two companies run by brothers: Morey’s City Diner and Les’ Exercise Studio. Morey and Les conclude that their businesses have a lot of synergy—people are either eating or trying to lose weight, and usually doing both. To smooth out their cash flow, they decide to merge their companies into More or Less Body Building and All You Can Eat Buffet. Your challenge: How to create one customer in QuickBooks from the two businesses, while retaining the jobs, invoices, and other transactions that they created when the companies were separate. The solution: QuickBooks’ merge feature.

Here’s another instance when merging can come in handy: If you don’t use a standard naming convention as recommended, you could end up with multiple customer records representing one real-life customer, such as Les’s Exercise Studio and LesEx. You can merge these doppelgangers into one customer just as you can merge two truly separate companies into one.

When you merge customer records in QuickBooks, one customer retains the entire transaction history for the two original customers. In other words, you don’t so much merge two customers as turn one customer’s records into those of another’s.

Merging customers in QuickBooks won’t win any awards for Most Intuitive Process. The basic procedure is to rename one customer to the same name as another. Sounds simple, right? But there’s a catch: The customer you rename can’t have any jobs associated with it.

So if the customer you want to rename has jobs associated with it, you have to move all those jobs to the customer you intend to keep before you start the merge. Your best bet: Subsume the customer with fewer jobs so you don’t have to move very many. If you don’t use jobs, then subsume whichever customer you want.

To merge customers with a minimum of angry outbursts, follow these steps:

1. Open the Customer Center. In the QuickBooks icon bar, click Customer Center or, on the left side of the QuickBooks Home page, click Customers R

 2. If the customer you’re going to merge has jobs associated with it, on the Customers & Jobs tab, position your cursor over the diamond to the left of the job you want to reassign. Jobs appear indented beneath the customer to which they belong. If you have hundreds of jobs for the customer, moving them is tedious at best—but move them you must.

3. When the cursor changes to a four-headed arrow, drag the job under the customer you plan to keep, as shown in Figure 4-13, left. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each job that belongs to the customer you’re going to subsume.

Left: When your cursor changes to a fourheaded arrow, you can drag within the Customers & Jobs tab to move the job. As you drag, a horizontal line between the two arrowheads shows you where the job will go when you release the mouse button. Right: After you reassign all the jobs to the customer you intend to keep, you can merge the now-jobless customer into the other. When the merge is complete, you see only the customer you kept.

4. On the Customers & Jobs tab, right-click the name of the customer you’re going to merge and, on the shortcut menu, choose Edit Customer:Job. You can also edit the customer by selecting the customer’s name on the Customer & Jobs tab and then, when the customer’s info appears on the right side of the Customer Center, clicking the Edit Customer button. Either way, the Edit Customer dialog box opens.

5. In the Edit Customer dialog box, edit the Customer Name field to match the name of the customer you intend to keep. Then click OK. QuickBooks displays a message letting you know that the name is in use and asking if you want to merge the customers.   

 6. Click Yes to merge the customers. In the Customer Center, the customer you renamed disappears and any customer balances now belong to the remaining customer.

 Hiding and Deleting Customers

Hiding customers isn’t about secreting them away when the competition shows up to talk to you. Because QuickBooks lets you delete customers only in very limited circumstances, hiding customers helps keep your list of customers manageable and your financial history intact. This section explains your options.

Deleting Customers

 You can delete a customer only if there’s no activity for that customer in your Quick- Books file. If you try to delete a customer that has even one transaction, QuickBooks tells you that you can’t delete that record. If you create a customer by mistake, you can remove it, as long as you first remove any associated transactions—which are likely to be mistakes as well. But QuickBooks doesn’t tell you which transactions are preventing you from deleting this customer. To delete transactions that prevent you from deleting a customer:

1. View all the transactions for the customer by selecting that customer in the Customer Center, and then setting the Show box to All Transactions and the Date box to All.

You can also view transactions by running the “Transaction List by Customer” report (Reports➝Customers & Receivables➝Transaction List by Customer).

When you select a customer in the Customer Center, the transaction pane in the lower-right shows that customer’s transactions. To see them all, in the Show dropdown list, choose All Transactions, and in the Date drop-down list, choose All.

2. In the Customer Center or the report, open the transaction you want to delete by double-clicking it. The Create Invoices window (or the corresponding transaction window) opens to the transaction you double-clicked.   â•‰â•‰Hiding and Deleting Customers

3. Choose Edit➝Delete Invoice (or Edit➝Delete Check, or the corresponding delete command). In the message box that appears, click OK to confirm that you want to delete the transaction. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for every transaction for that customer.

 4. Back on the Customers & Jobs tab, select the customer you want to delete, and then press Ctrl+D or choose Edit➝Delete Customer:Job. If the customer has no transactions, QuickBooks asks you to confirm that you want to delete the customer. Click Yes. If you see a message telling you that you can’t delete the customer, go back to steps 2 and 3 to delete any remaining transactions.

Hiding and Restoring Customers

Although your work with a customer might be at an end, you still have to keep records about your past relationship. But old customers can clutter up your Customer Center, making it difficult to select active customers. Hiding such customers is a better solution than deleting them, because QuickBooks retains the historical transactions for that customer, so you can reactivate them if they decide to work with you again. And hiding removes customer names from all the lists that appear in transaction windows so you can’t select them by mistake. To hide a customer, in the Customer Center, right-click the customer and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Make Customer:Job Inactive. The customer and any associated jobs disappear from the list. Figure 4-15 shows you how to unhide (reactivate) customers.

To make hidden customers visible again and reactivate their records, in the View drop-down list, choose All Customers. QuickBooks displays an X to the left of every inactive customer in the list. Click that X to restore the customer to active duty.