Customizing QuickBooks Invoices

QuickBooks lets you customize an invoice form to suit the needs of your business, but there may be times when you want to design a completely different invoice form.

QuickBooks lets you do that, too. You can use the Layout Designer to create a new form design for your business. In the Layout Designer, you can move, resize, or change the width of columns, turn on or off borders around fields, and control font type and size for each field.

In the following exercises, you’ll use both the customize forms and Layout Designer features in QuickBooks to create a custom invoice.

Note that these features affect only the printed forms; you cannot customize the onscreen version of QuickBooks forms.

Creating New Templates

To create a new invoice template:

1 From the Lists menu, choose Templates.

QuickBooks displays the Templates list.

2 Click the Templates menu button, and then choose New.

QuickBooks displays the Select Template Type window.

3 Click OK to select the invoice form.

QuickBooks displays the Basic Customization window.

4 Click the Manage Templates button to give the template a name.

5 In the Template Name field, type My Invoice and click OK.

This is the name you’ll use for the new template.

6 Look at the options in the Logo & Fonts section of the Basic Customization window.

Use this section to change the fonts for various textual elements on the form and to choose a color scheme.

If you wanted to add your company logo to the form, you would select the Use Logo checkbox and tell QuickBooks which file to use. QuickBooks supports BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, WMF, EMF, and GIF graphic formats.

7 In the Company & Transaction section, select the Phone Number checkbox.

Use this section of the window to specify which pieces of company information to include on your sales and purchase forms.

QuickBooks displays a message that you can use the Layout Designer to change the layout of your form. You’ll learn how to use the Layout Designer later in this lesson.

8 Select the “Do not display this message in the future” checkbox, and then click OK.

If you don’t want QuickBooks to print the status stamp (paid, pending, etc.) on forms, clear the Print Status Stamp checkbox on this tab.

9 Leave the Basic Customization window open. You’ll use it in the next exercise.

Customizing Fields On Forms

You can further customize your invoice template by setting formatting options and changing how fields display.

To customize fields on a template:

1 Click the Additional Customization button at the bottom of the window.

QuickBooks displays the Additional Customization window, which uses multiple tabs to display several sets of formatting options. Each area of the form is represented by a tab. To display the available formatting options, click the tab for the area of the form you want to change. QuickBooks shows you a preview of the invoice as you make selections on the tabs.

Notice that the Header tab is currently selected. The Header tab is where you select which fields you want to appear onscreen, on paper, both, or neither. You can specify your own title (label) for each field. You can enter a new title by highlighting the current title text and typing your new one.

If you want to track information about a particular invoice, but don’t want your customer to see this information, select the Screen checkbox and clear the Print checkbox.

Suppose you want to remind customers of payment due dates at the time you send the invoice. You can customize the invoice form to display the Due Date field.

2 To have the Due Date field display both on screen and on the printed form, click the Screen checkbox for Due Date to select it.

3 Click the Print checkbox for Due Date.

Checkmarks appear in both checkboxes.

4 Clear the Screen and Print checkboxes for the P.O. No. field to remove the field from the form.

Notice that the invoice preview shows the changes you’ve made.

Changing Field Order On Forms

The lower half of the standard QuickBooks invoice form is where you enter details about the items or services purchased by the customer. You can change the order of these fields as they appear on your invoices.

The Order column shows you how fields display from left to right on the invoice form.

Currently, Item is the first column and Amount is the last column. Suppose you want the Qty field to appear after the Item field, and before the Description field.

To change the order of fields on a form:

1 Click the Columns tab.

2 Double-click the Order column in the Quantity row to select the number.

3 Type 2.

4 Double-click the Order column in the Description row to select it.

5 If it has not changed to 3 automatically, type 3.

If you use progress invoices or sales orders, use the Prog Cols tab to customize the columns on those forms.

6 Click the Footer tab.

The Footer tab contains information that you usually find at the bottom of the form. It also provides a place for you to enter free-form text, such as a disclaimer, on your form. In the next exercise, you’ll learn how to move fields on forms.

7 Click the Print tab.

Use the Print tab to associate print settings with individual form templates. For example, if you print most forms in Portrait mode, but have one form that you print in Landscape, you can associate the Landscape print setting with that form’s template. When you send the form to the printer, QuickBooks knows to print it in Landscape.

If your forms print on multiple pages, select whether or not you want to print page numbers.

8 Click OK to record the changes.

9 Click OK again and then close the Templates window.

Displaying Your Customized Form

Now display the customized form to see the changes you made in the previous exercise.

To display the custom form:

1 From the Customers menu, choose Create Invoices.

QuickBooks displays the Create Invoices window with the Intuit Product Invoice template displayed.

2 In the Template field, choose My Invoice from the drop-down list.

Notice how this form reflects the changes you made in the Customize Invoice window. The Due Date field now displays onscreen and the Qty column appears in its new order before the Description field.

The phone number field that you added to the form only shows on the printed form, so you do not see it onscreen.