Customers, Employees, Company and Banking

Customers

Like its vendor-related sibling, the Customers panel has icons for customer-oriented commands like creating invoices, statements, sales receipts, and so on. (Chapter 10 describes how to work with invoices, estimates, sales orders, refunds, and customer credits. Chapter 11 covers the commands for creating statement charges and statements. Receiving payments and sales receipts

for cash sales are both described in Chapter 13.) Click the Customers button on the left side of the panel (or choose Customers➝Customer Center) to open the Customer Center, where you can perform the following tasks:

 • Create a new customer or job. In the Customer Center toolbar at the top of the window, click New Customer & Job. In the drop-down menu, choose New Customer to create a new customer record ( 62), or choose “Add Multiple Customer:Jobs” to add several customers. If you want to add a job to a customer, first select the customer in the Customers & Jobs tab on the left side of the Customer Center, and then click New Customer & Job➝Add Job.

• Find a customer. You can filter the Customer & Jobs tab’s list to show active customers, only customers who owe you money (customers with open balances), and so on, simply by choosing an option from the tab’s View menu. Choose Custom Filter to specify criteria for the customers you want to see. To search for a specific customer, type part of the customer’s name in the Find box, and then click the Find button (it has a magnifying glass on it).

 • Review a customer record. When you select a customer in the Customers & Jobs tab, the right side of the window displays the basic 411 about that customer. In the Customer Information section, shown in Figure 2-3, you can send an email to that customer, attach electronic documents to the customer’s record, get directions to their location, add notes to the record, look at key information like the customer’s open balance, or run reports about the customer.

To open or edit a customer’s record, in the Customers & Jobs tab, select the customer so it appears in the Customer Information section. Then click the Edit Customer button (circled).   The QuickBooks Home Pa

• Review the status of a customer. On the right side of the Customer Center, click the Customer Snapshot link to open the Company Snapshot window  to the Customer tab. There, you can quickly scan the customer’s recent invoices and payments, look at a bar graph of sales you’ve made to the customer by time period, or review the items that the customer buys the most.

 • Edit an existing customer’s record. To open the Edit Customer window, in the Customers & Jobs tab, either right-click a customer’s name and then choose Edit Customer, or select a customer and then click the Edit Customer button.

• Attach an electronic document to a customer record. You can add attachments to a customer’s record or scan them in QuickBooks.

• Create transactions for a customer. In the Customer Center toolbar, click New Transactions and then choose one of the transaction types from the drop-down menu, such as Estimates, Invoices, or Receive Payments. The items in this menu are the same as the icons in the Home page’s Customers panel and open the corresponding window to record that type of transaction.

• Review transactions for a customer. The table at the bottom-right of the Customer Center lists the transactions for the customer you select in the Customers & Jobs tab. You can filter these transactions by type (estimates or invoices, for example), status, and date. Double-click a transaction in the list to open a window with details about that transaction.

• Print or export customer information. In the Customer Center toolbar, click Print to print customer information or click Excel to import or export customer and job info.

• Prepare customer letters. In the Customer Center toolbar, click Word to create letters to customers

Employees

The Employees panel has only a few icons. The devilish details arise when you click one of these icons to enter time, set up paychecks, or pay payroll tax liabilities. The Employee Center works the same way as the Vendor and Customer Centers you just learned about. To open it, click Employees on the left side of the Home page or choose Employees➝Employee Center.

In the Employee Center, you can create new records for employees, update info for existing employees, and view transactions like paychecks. On the Employees tab, you can filter the employee list to view active employees, released employees (ones who no longer work for you), or all employees.   ╉The Company Snapshot

Company

The Company panel is on the right half of the Home page. The two icons in this panel that you’ll probably click most often are Chart of Accounts and Items & Services, which open the Chart of Accounts and Item List windows, respectively. If you track inventory, click the Inventory Activities icon and then choose a command, such as Adjust Quantity On Hand, which lets you change the quantity and value of your inventory.

 Banking

The Home page’s Banking panel is a one-stop shop for banking tasks. Whether you visit this panel frequently or almost never depends on how you like to record transactions. For example, you can click the Write Checks icon to open the Write Checks window or simply press Ctrl+W to do the same thing. (Or, if you like to record checks in a check register window, you might prefer to double-click your bank account in the Chart of Accounts window instead.)

Similarly, the Enter Credit Card Charges icon opens the Enter Credit Card Charges window, but you can record credit card charges directly in a credit card register. Clicking the Record Deposits icon opens the “Payments to Deposit” dialog box so you can record bank deposits. The Reconcile icon opens the Begin Reconciliation dialog box so you can reconcile your QuickBooks records to your bank’s . And the Print Checks icon opens the “Select Checks to Print” dialog box so you can select the checks you want to print and send them to a printer loaded with blank checks.