The Vendor List

 

Open any QuickBooks window, dialog box, or form, and you’re bound to bump into at least one list. These drop-down lists make it easy to fill in transactions and forms. Creating an invoice? If you pick the customer and job from the Customer: Job List, QuickBooks fills in the customer’s address, payment terms, and other fields for you. Selecting the payment terms from the Terms List tells

QuickBooks how to calculate the due date for the invoice. If you choose an entry in the Price Level List, QuickBooks calculates the discount you extend to your customers for the goods they buy. Even the products and services you sell to your customers come from the Item List, which you learned about in Chapter 5.

In this chapter, you’ll discover what the different lists actually do for you and whether you should bother setting them up for your business. Because some lists have their own unique fields (such as the Price Level Type for a Price Level entry), you’ll also learn what the various fields do and how to fill them in. If you already know which lists and list entries you want, you can skip to “Creating and Editing List Entries” to master the techniques that work for most lists in QuickBooks, such as adding and tweaking entries, hiding entries, and so on. Once you learn how to work with one QuickBooks list, the doors to almost every other list open, too.   â•‰The Vendor List

Note: The Customer, Vendor, and Employee lists are the exceptions. Although you’ll learn about the Vendor List in this chapter, here are the other chapters that provide instructions for working with a few other QuickBooks lists:

• The Chart of Accounts, which is a list of your bookkeeping accounts, is covered in Chapter 3.

 • The Customer:Job List, which includes entries for both customers and their jobs, is the topic of Chapter 4.

 • The Item List helps you fill in invoices and other sales forms with services and products you sell; it’s described in Chapter 5.

• Although the Sales Tax Code List appears on the Lists menu, sales tax codes are inextricably linked to how you handle sales tax. Details for setting up this list are described in Chapter 5.

• Chapter 12 shows you how to have QuickBooks memorize transactions so you can reuse them.

• If you turn on the payroll feature, the Lists menu includes the Payroll Item List, which covers the deposits and deductions on your payroll. Payroll Items are quite specialized, and Quick- Books has tools to help you set them up, which are explained in detail in Chapter 14

 • Chapter 25 describes how to create and modify templates for your QuickBooks business forms.

The Vendor List

There’s no way around it: You’re going to work with vendors and pay them for their services and products. The telephone company, your accountant, and the subcontractor who installs Venetian plaster in your spec houses are all vendors. You can create vendors in QuickBooks one at a time, whenever you get the first bill from a new vendor. But if you already know who most of your vendors are, it’s easier to create those entries all at once so you can write checks or enter bills without interruptions.

 The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries feature lets you paste data from Microsoft Excel or copy values from vendor to vendor. It works the same way for customer, vendor, and item lists.

Importing vendor information into QuickBooks is another fast way to create oodles of vendor records. After you create a map between QuickBooks’ fields and fields in another program, you can transfer all your vendor info with one command. In this section, you’ll see what fields QuickBooks uses for vendor information. Use the instructions in conjunction with the vendor fields in Table 6-1) to import vendor records into QuickBooks.

The Vendor Center makes creating, editing, and reviewing vendors in QuickBooks a breeze. Like the Customer Center, the Vendor Center lists the details of your vendors and their transactions in one easy-to-use dashboard. To open the Vendor Center window, use any of the following methods:

• Choose Vendors➝Vendor Center.

 • On the left side of the QuickBooks Home page, click Vendors.

 • In the icon bar, click Vendor Center.   

Creating a Vendor

You create a new vendor from the Vendor Center window by pressing Ctrl+N (or, in the Vendor Center menu bar, clicking New Vendor➝New Vendor). The New Vendor dialog box opens.

 Many of the fields you see should be familiar from creating customers in Quick- Books. For example, the Vendor Name field corresponds to the Customer Name field, which you might remember is actually more of a code than a name. Use the same sort of naming convention for vendors that you use for customers. As with customer records, you’re better off leaving the Opening Balance field blank and building your current vendor balance by entering the invoices or bills they send. The following sections explain how to fill out the rest of the fields in a vendor record.

Entering Address Information

If you print checks and envelopes to pay your bills, you’ll need address and contact information for your vendors. The Address Info tab in the New Vendor dialog box has fields for the vendor’s address and contact info, which are almost identical to customer address and contact fields, if you need help filling them in. The one additional vendor field on the Address Info tab is “Print on Check as”, which QuickBooks automatically fills in with the name you enter in the vendor’s Company Name field. When you print checks, QuickBooks fills in the payee with the name in the “Print on Check as” field, so to use a different name, simply edit the name in this box

. Additional Info

The Additional Info tab, shown in Figure 6-1, has fields that are a bit different than the ones you see for customers. The following list describes what they are and what you can do with them.

• Account No. When you create customers, you can assign an account number to them. When it’s your turn to be a customer, your vendors return the favor and assign an account number to your company. If you fill in this box with the account number that the vendor gave you, QuickBooks prints it in the memo field of the checks you print. Even if you don’t print checks, keeping your account number in QuickBooks is handy if a question arises about one of your payments.

• Type. If you want to classify vendors or generate reports based on types of vendors, choose an entry in the Type drop-down list or create a new type in the Vendor Type List by choosing <Add New>. For example, if you assign a Tax type to all the tax agencies you remit taxes to, you can easily prepare a report of your tax liabilities and payments.   ╉The Vendor List

The fields on the Additional Info tab are easy to fill in—just remember that they pertain to your account with the vendor. For example, the Account No. field holds the account number that the vendor assigned to your company, and the Credit Limit field represents how much credit the vendor extends to you.

• Terms. Choose the payment terms that the vendor extended to your company. The entries in the Terms drop-down list are the same for both vendors and customers.

• Credit Limit. If the vendor has set a credit limit for your company (like $30,000 from a building supply store), type that value in this box. That way, QuickBooks warns you when you create a purchase order that pushes your credit balance above your credit limit.

• Tax ID. You have to fill in this field with the vendor’s Employer Identification Number (EIN) or Social Security number only if you’re going to create a 1099 for the vendor.

Note: When you hire subcontractors to do work for you, you first ask them to fill out a W-9 form, which tells you the subcontractor’s taxpayer identification number (Social Security number or Federal Employer Information Number, for example). Then, at the end of the year, you fill out a 1099 tax form that indicates how much you paid them, which they use to prepare their tax returns.

• Vendor eligible for 1099. Turn on this checkbox if you’re going to create a 1099 for the vendor.

• Billing Rate Level. If you use the Contractor, Professional Services, or Accountant edition of QuickBooks, this is another list that lets you set up custom billing rates for employees and vendors. The Billing Rate Level list helps you price the services you sell the same way a Price Level helps you adjust the prices on products you sell. Say you have three carpenters: a newbie, an old timer, and a finish carpenter. You can set up a Billing Rate Level for each one based on their experience. Then, when you create an invoice for your carpenters’ billable time, QuickBooks automatically applies the correct rate to each carpenter’s hours

 • Custom fields. If you want to track vendor information that isn’t handled by the fields that QuickBooks provides, you can include several custom fields. Say your subcontractors are supposed to have current certificates for workers’ comp insurance, and you could be in big trouble if you hire a subcontractor whose certificate has expired. If you create a custom field to hold the expiration date for each subcontractor’s certificate, you can generate a report of workers’ comp expiration dates.

Importing Vendor Information

To import vendor data into QuickBooks, you first have to export a delimited text file or a spreadsheet from the other program so that each piece of information is separated with commas or tabs, or into columns and rows in a spreadsheet file. QuickBooks looks for keywords in the import file to tell it what to do, so you usually have to rename some headings to transform an export file produced by another program into an import file that QuickBooks can read. QuickBooks’ vendor keywords and the fields they represent are listed in Table 6-1. Fortunately, Excel and other spreadsheet programs make it easy to edit the headings on columns.

Tip: To see how QuickBooks wants a delimited file to look, export your current QuickBooks vendor list to an .iif file and then open it in Excel.

Filling in Expense Accounts Automatically

When you write checks, record credit card charges, or enter bills for a vendor, you have to indicate the expense account to which you want to assign the payment. QuickBooks is happy to fill in these expense account names for you if you tell it which ones you typically use. Then all you do is type the amounts that go with each account. Here are the steps:

1. In the New Vendor dialog box, click the Account Prefill tab. The Account Prefill tab includes three drop-down lists, so you can assign up to three expense accounts for each vendor. (Each drop-down list shows all the accounts in your chart of accounts, not just expense accounts.)

2. In each drop-down list, choose the expense account you want. For example, if you get office equipment and supplies from one vendor, choose Office Equipment in the first drop-down list and Office Supplies in the second.

Tip: To remove the accounts you’ve assigned, click the Clear All button.

3. Click OK to save the vendor’s record. Now, when you choose that vendor’s name in the Write Checks, Enter Credit Card Charges, or Enter Bills dialog box, QuickBooks fills in the Expenses tab with the expense accounts you assigned. If you record a transaction directly in the register, the   chapter 6: setting up other quickbooks lists expense accounts appear automatically in the split transaction Account fields (if you assigned more than one expense account) as soon as you choose the vendor’s name.

Note: You don’t have to use the prefill accounts. Instead, you can simply click an Account field and choose a different account or leave the amounts blank and add new accounts below the prefilled entries.