Creating Items

 

The best time to create items is after you’ve created your accounts but before you start billing customers. Each item links to an account in your chart of accounts, so creating items goes quicker if you don’t have to stop to create an account as well.   

Similarly, you can create items while you’re in the midst of creating an invoice, but you’ll find that creating items goes much faster when you create several items at once. How long it takes to create items depends on how many items you need. If you sell only a few services, a few minutes should do it. On the other hand, construction companies that need thousands of items often forego hours of data entry by importing items from third-party programs.

Creating Multiple Items

 Introduced in QuickBooks 2010, the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries feature is a real time-saver when you want to populate your Item List. If you’re comfortable working with Excel, you can set up an Excel spreadsheet and fill in values for all your items using that program’s features and shortcuts. Then, you can paste data from Excel into the table in the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window. This feature works for customer, vendor, and item lists; Here’s how you get started with using Add/Edit Multiple List Entries to fill in items:

1. On the QuickBooks Home page, in the Company panel, click Items & Services.

The Item List window opens.

2. Right-click the Item List window, and then choose Add/Edit Multiple Items on the shortcut menu. (Alternatively, at the bottom of the window, click Item➝Add/Edit Multiple Items.)

The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window opens. The List box is set to Service Items or the type of item you selected the last time you used this feature. The window’s table initially displays the active items for the selected type in the List box, which makes sense because you typically want to add or edit items that you’re currently using If you want to filter the list to show specific kinds of items, in the View drop-down list, choose the view you want.

3. If you want to work with a different type of item, in the List drop-down menu, choose Service Items, Inventory Parts, or Non-inventory Parts.

The columns that you see in the table vary depending on the type of item you select, as Figure 5-4 shows. For example, for Service items, the table includes Item Name, “Subitem of ”, Sales Price, Income Account, and Sales Tax Code columns. If you choose Inventory Parts, you see a COGS Account column, among others.

4. Switch to Excel and copy the data you want from your spreadsheet.

The order of the fields in the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries table and your Excel spreadsheet have to match or you’ll see errors when you paste the data (which you’ll do in the next step). To fix that, you can reorder your columns in either Excel or QuickBooks.

5. Click the Customize Columns button to insert or remove columns in the table, or change their order to match the columns in your Excel spreadsheet.

   Creating Items

Tip: If you want to copy parent and subitems into the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries table, copy the toplevel items first, followed by a separate copy pass for each subsequent level of your item list. That way, the parent items you need will already exist so the new entries will copy in without errors.

In the List drop-down menu, choose the type of item you want to work on. The table displays the active items for the selected type, so you can add or edit the items you use. If you want to change the columns that appear in the table or change their order, click the Customize Columns button on the right side of the window (not shown here).

6. Back in the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window, click the first blank Item Name cell and then right-click and choose Paste (or press Ctrl+V).

QuickBooks pastes the copied data in the cells to the right of and below the Item Name cell you selected. Cells that contain data with errors, such as invalid values or list entries that don’t exist in QuickBooks, appear in red text.

Creating Individual Items

Each type of item has its own assortment of fields, but the overall process for creating an item is the same for every type. With the following procedure under your belt, you’ll find that you can create many of your items without further instruction. If you do need help with fields for a specific type of item, read the sections that follow to learn what each field does.

1. On the QuickBooks Home page, click Items & Services (or, choose Lists➝Item List) to open the Item List window.

When you first display the Item List, QuickBooks sorts the entries by type. The sort order for the item types isn’t alphabetical—it’s the order that types appear in the Type drop-down list, as shown in Figure 5-5. You can change the sort order of the list by clicking a column header.

2. Open the New Item dialog box by pressing Ctrl+N or, on the menu bar at the bottom of the window, clicking Item➝New.

QuickBooks opens the New Item dialog box and highlights the Service item type in the Type drop-down list.   Creating Items

QuickBooks lists items in alphabetical order within each item type. You can change the sort order of the list by clicking a column heading. If you click it again, QuickBooks toggles the list between ascending and descending order. To return the list to being sorted by item type, click the diamond to the left of the column headings (which appears any time the list is sorted by a column other than Type).

3. To create a Service item, just press Tab to proceed with naming the item. If you want to create any other type of item, choose it in the Type drop-down list.

Some item types won’t appear in the list if you haven’t turned on the corresponding feature. For example, the Inventory Item type doesn’t appear if you haven’t turned on inventory tracking.

4. In the Item Name/Number box, type a unique identifier for the item.

For example, if you opt for long and meaningful names, you might type Install carpet and vacuum. For a short name, you might type Inst Carpt.

5. To make this item a subitem, turn on the “Subitem of ” checkbox and choose the item that you want to act as the parent.

You can create the parent item while you’re creating a subitem, but creating the parent first reduces the strain on your brain. If the parent item already exists, simply choose it from the “Subitem of ” drop-down list. To create the parent while creating the subitem, choose <Add New> on the “Subitem of ” list, and then jump to step 3 to begin the parent creation process. Subitems and parents have to be the same type; also, you can’t create subitems for Subtotal, Group, or Payment items.

6. Complete the other fields as described in the following sections for the type of item that you’re creating).

QuickBooks will use the info you enter to fill in fields on sales forms. For example, QuickBooks uses the sales price you enter on an invoice when you sell some units. If the sales price changes each time, simply leave the item’s Sales Price field at zero. That way, QuickBooks doesn’t fill in the price, so you can type in the price each time you sell the item. (Even if you set up a value for an item, you can overwrite it whenever you use the item on a sales form.)

You have to assign an account to every item, whether it’s a parent or not.

 7. When you have additional items to create, simply click Next to save the current item and start another. If you want to save the item you just created and close the New Item dialog box, click OK.

If you’ve made mistakes in several fields or need more information before you can complete an item, click Cancel to throw away the current item and close the New Item dialog box.