Every list in QuickBooks
responds to the same set of commands. As your business changes, you can add new
entries, edit existing ones, hide entries that you no longer use, and (in some
lists) merge two entries into one. If you make a mistake creating an entry, you
can delete it. You can also print your QuickBooks lists to produce a price list
of the products you sell, for example. With the following techniques, you’ll be
able to do what you want with any list or entry you might need.
Creating Entries
If you’re setting up
QuickBooks, creating all the entries for a list at the same time is fast and
efficient. Open the New dialog box for the type of list entry you want (New
Vendor, for example), and you’ll soon get into a rhythm creating one entry
after another. You can also add new list entries in the middle of bookkeeping
tasks without too much of an interruption. If you launch a new line of business
selling moose repellent, for example, you can add a customer type for burly men
in the middle of creating an invoice. But don’t rely on this approach to add
every entry to every list—you’ll spend so much time jumping from dialog box to
dialog box that you’ll never get to your bookkeeping. Each list has its own
collection of fields, but the overall procedure for creating entries in lists
is the same:
1. Open the window for the
list you want to work on by choosing Lists and then selecting the list you want
on the submenu. For example, to open the
Class List window, choose Lists➝Class
List. Several lists are tucked away one level deeper on the Lists menu. For
lists that include characteristics of your customers or vendors, such as Vendor
Type or Terms, choose Lists➝Customer
& Vendor Profile Lists, and then choose the list you want, as shown in
Figure 6-7.
Figure 6-7:╇ Many of QuickBooks’ lists appear directly
on the Lists menu, but some are one level lower on the Customer & Vendor
Profile Lists submenu, shown here. To boost your productivity, take note of the
keyboard shortcuts for lists you’re likely to access most often. For example,
Ctrl+A opens the Chart of Accounts window. (Online Appendix C lists lots of
other handy keyboard shortcuts.) To see customer, vendor, or employee lists, on
the left side of the QuickBooks Home page, click Customers, Vendors, or
Employees to open the corresponding center. •‰Merging List Entries
2. To create a new entry,
press Ctrl+N or, at the bottom of the list window, click the button with the list’s
name on it, and then choose New. For instance, to create an
entry in the Class List, make sure that the Class List window is active and
then press Ctrl+N. Or, at the bottom of the Class List window, click Class➝New. Either way, QuickBooks opens the New Class dialog box. A few
of the lists on the Customer & Vendor Profile Lists menu can include subentries,
as shown in Figure 6-8. 
Figure 6-8:╇ You can create multiple levels of entries
in the Customer Type, Job Type, and Vendor Type lists. For example, you might
create top-level types for vendors who require 1099 forms and those that don’t.
Then, you can create subentries for types such as electricians, plumbers, and
carpenters.
3. After you’ve completed
one entry, simply click Next to save the current entry and begin another. To
save the entry you just created and close the dialog box, click OK. To toss an entry that you botched, click Cancel to throw it away
and close the dialog box.
Note: Unlike all the other New dialog boxes for
lists, the New Price Level dialog box doesn’t include a Next button. Editing Entries To modify a list entry, open the window for that list. Then,
select the entry you want to edit and press Ctrl+E (or double-click the entry).
When the Edit dialog box opens, make the changes you want, and then click OK.
Merging List Entries
You can merge entries on
only two of the lists discussed in this chapter: the Vendor List and the Other
Names List. (Merging accounts in your chart of accounts merging customers. You
can’t undo a merge, so make sure merging is really what you want to do. The
alternative is to chapter 6: setting up other quickbooks lists change one of
the two entries to inactive, and then use the other entry for all future
transactions
. When you merge entries,
QuickBooks puts all the transactions from both entries into the one that you
keep. For example, if you merge Financial Finesse into Fuggedaboudit Financial,
all your payments to Financial Finesse become payments to Fuggedaboudit Financial.
Here’s how to merge two
entries, using the Vendor List as an example:
1. Switch to single-user
mode. If you work in multi-user mode, choose File➝“Switch to Single-user Mode”. (When you’re done, be sure to switch
back to multi-user mode and tell your colleagues they can work in QuickBooks
again.)
2. Open the Vendor Center.
On the QuickBooks Home page, click Vendors, or
choose Vendors➝Vendor Center. (If you want
to merge names on the Other Names List, choose Lists➝Other Names List.)
3. On the Vendors tab,
right-click the name of the vendor you’re going to merge and, on the shortcut
menu, choose Edit Vendor. The Edit Vendor dialog box
opens.
4. In the Edit Vendor
dialog box, change the name in the Vendor Name field to match the name of the
vendor you intend to keep, and then click OK. QuickBooks
displays a message warning you that the name is in use and asks if you want to
merge the vendors.
5. Click Yes to merge the
vendors. In the Vendor Center, the
vendor you renamed disappears and any balances it had now belong to the
remaining vendor. Don’t forget to switch back to multi-user mode so your
coworkers can use Quick- Books again.
Hiding and Deleting
List Entries
Deleting entries is only
for discarding entries that you create by mistake. If you’ve already used list
entries in transactions, hide the entries you don’t use anymore so your
historical records are complete. For example, you wouldn’t delete the “Net 30” payment
term just because you’re lucky enough to have only Net 15 clients right now;
you may still extend Net 30 terms to some clients in the future.
Hiding Entries
Hiding list entries that
you no longer use does two things:
• Your previous
transactions still use the entries you’ve hidden, so your historical records
don’t change. Hiding and Deleting List
Entrie
• When you create new
transactions, the hidden entries don’t appear in dropdown lists, so you can’t
choose an old entry by mistake.
The methods for hiding and
reactivating list entries are exactly the same regardless of which list you’re
working on:
• Hide an entry. In the list’s window or the
list in the Vendor Center, right-click the entry and choose “Make <list name> Inactive” from the
shortcut menu, where <list name> is the list that you’re editing. The entry
disappears from the list.
• View all the entries in a list. At
the bottom of the list’s window, turn on the “Include inactive” checkbox so you
can see both active and hidden entries. (In the Vendor Center, in the View
drop-down list, choose All Vendors.) QuickBooks adds a column with an X as its
heading and displays an X in that column for every inactive entry in the list.
• Reactivate an entry. First, view all the
entries, and then click the X next to the entry that you want to reactivate. If
the entry has subentries, in the Activate Group dialog box that appears, click
Yes to reactivate the entry and all its subentries. GEM IN THE ROUGH
Figure 6-9:╇ When you edit an item in the Items List,
click Custom Fields in the Edit Item dialog box. In the Custom Fields dialog
box, click Define Fields to create labels for up to five custom fields for your
items. Unlike names in name lists, which can have up to 15 custom fields, items
can have only 5 custom fields.
Deleting Entries
You can delete a list entry
only if nothing in QuickBooks references it in any way. So if you create a list
entry by mistake, your only hope at getting rid of it is to catch it quickly.
To delete a list entry, open the appropriate list window and select the entry you
want to delete, and then press Ctrl+D or choose Edit➝Delete <list name>. If you haven’t used the entry in any records or
transactions, QuickBooks asks you to confirm that you want to delete the entry;
click Yes.
Finding List Entries
in Transactions
If QuickBooks won’t let you
delete a list entry because a transaction is still using it, don’t worry—it’s
easy to find transactions that use a specific list entry. Here’s how:
1. Open the list that
contains the entry you want to find. In the list’s window, select the entry.
2. At the bottom of the
list window, click the button labeled with the list’s name and choose “Find in
Transactions”, or right-click the entry and choose Find on the shortcut menu. The Find dialog box opens already set up to search for
transactions that use the list entry you selected.
3. Click Find. The table at the bottom of the Find dialog box displays all the
transactions that use that entry.
4. To modify the list
entry a transaction uses, select the transaction in the table, and then click
Go To. QuickBooks opens the window or dialog box that
corresponds to the type of transaction. If you’re trying to eliminate
references to a list entry so you can delete it, choose a different list entry
and then save the transaction. ╉Sorting Lists
Sorting Lists QuickBooks sorts lists alphabetically by name, which is usually
what you want. The only reason to sort a list another way is if you’re having
trouble finding the entry you want to edit. For example, if you want to find equipment
you bought within the last few years, you could sort the Fixed Asset List by
purchase date to find the machines that you’re still depreciating. Figure 6-10
shows you how to change the sort order— and how to change it back.
Note: Sorting in the list window doesn’t change
the order that entries appear in drop-down lists.
Figure 6-10:╇ To sort a list by a column, click the column’s
heading, such as Purchase Date. The first time you click the heading, QuickBooks
sorts the list in ascending order. To toggle between ascending and descending order,
click the heading again. The small black triangle in the heading points up when
the list is in ascending order and down when it’s in descending order.
Note: If you use a different column to sort a list,
QuickBooks displays a gray diamond to the left of the column heading that it
used to sort the list initially. For example, the Fixed Asset Item List shows
items in alphabetical order by Name. If you sort the list by Purchase Date
instead, a gray diamond appears to the left of the Name heading, as shown in
Figure 6-10. To return the list to the order that QuickBooks uses, click the
diamond.
Printing Lists
After you spend all that
time building lists in QuickBooks, you’ll be happy to know that it’s much
easier to get those lists out of the program than it was to put them in. For
instance, suppose you want to print a price list of all the items you sell, or
you chapter 6: setting up other
quickbooks lists want a text file of your customer information to import into
your email program. QuickBooks makes short work of printing your lists or
turning them into files that you can use in other programs.
Blasting Out a Quick List
Here’s the fastest way to
produce a list, albeit one that doesn’t give you any control over the report’s
appearance:
1. At the bottom of a
list’s window, click the button labeled with the list’s name— like Price Level,
for example—and then, in the drop-down menu, choose Print List (or press
Ctrl+P). QuickBooks might display a
message box telling you to try list reports if you want to customize or format
your reports. That method is covered in the next section. For now, in the
message box, click OK. The Print Lists dialog box opens.
Note: To print customer, vendor, or employee lists,
in the Customer Center, Vendor Center, or Employee Center toolbar, click Print
and then choose Customer & Job List, Vendor List, or Employee List,
respectively.
2. To print the list,
select the “Printer” option and then choose the printer in the drop-down list.
If you want to output the list to a file, choose the File option and then
select the file format you want. If you go with the Printer
option, you can specify printer settings, as you can in many other programs.
Choose landscape or portrait orientation, the pages to print, and the number of
copies. If you choose File, you can create ASCII text files, comma-delimited
files, or tab-delimited files.
3. Click Print.
QuickBooks prints the
report or creates the type of file you selected.
Customizing a Printed List
If the Print List command
described in the previous section scatters fields over the page or produces a
comma-delimited file that doesn’t play well with your email program, you’ll be
happy to know that QuickBooks might offer a report closer to what you have in
mind. For example, a vendor phone list and employee contact list are only two
clicks away.
To access the reports that
come with QuickBooks, choose Reports➝List
and then choose the report you want. If these reports fall short, you can
modify them to change the fields and records they include, or format them in a
variety of ways. Chapter 21 explains how to customize reports, but if you click
Modify Report in a report window’s toolbar, you can make the following changes
to a list report you print the list or create a file containing the list’s
info. In the Modify Report window that appears, you can:
• Choose fields. On the Display tab, the
Columns box includes every field for a list entry. When you click a field,
QuickBooks adds a checkmark before its name and adds that field to the report.
• Sort records. On the Display tab,
choose the field you want to sort by and whether you want the report sorted in
ascending or descending order.
• Filter the report. You can use the settings
on the Filters tab to limit the records in a report. For example, you can
produce an employee report for active employees, which refers to their
employment status—not the level of effort they devote to their jobs. You can
also filter by employee name or by values in other fields.
• Set up the report header and footer. On the Header/Footer tab, you can choose the information that
you want to show in the report’s title and in the footer at the bottom of each
page. A report’s title identifies the data in the report, and the footer can
include the date the report was prepared so you know whether it’s current.
• Format text and numbers. On the Fonts &
Numbers tab, you can choose the font that QuickBooks uses for different parts
of the report. For instance, labels should be larger than the lines in the
report. You can also choose how to display negative numbers: The In Bright Red
checkbox controls whether red ink truly applies to your financial reports. If
you like, turn on the Divide By 1,000 checkbox to make QuickBooks remove three
zeroes from the end of each number before displaying it in the report so it’s
easier to differentiate thousands from millions.
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