Manage Customers and Jobs in QuickBooks Pro 2017 Part 2
During this QuickBooks Pro 2017 tutorial video, we will continue with setting up a new customer. We also will show you how to create new contacts and to-do lists, how to pin notes, and how to add multiple customers at once.
Video Transcript
Hey. Welcome back. This is still section 1 of module 4 where we’re talking about working with customers and jobs. This is part 2 so we’re going to continue talking about setting up a brand new customer.
Okay once you get the Payment Setting screen set up then go to the next tab that says Sales Tax Settings. Now if you charge sales tax in your business one of the things you’ll have to tell QuickBooks is is this customer a taxable customer or not because it could be they’re a nonprofit organization and they’re nontaxable. If they are taxable then you have to tell it which tax item that you want to refer to this customer and that’s where you would fill this in. But when we get into the module about sales tax we’ll talk a little bit more about that.
You also have the tab that says Additional Info. Here’s where you can specify is this customer a commercial or residential. Of course you’d be setting your own list up there. If you have sales reps in your organization you can set those up so that you know which sales rep works with this customer. And then on the right you have these custom fields as they’re called. None of these fields that you see are set up automatically.
They set them up for the exercise. Now the way they did this was they went down here to Define Fields, they created whatever they wanted the field to be called and then they checked off if that field should be available when setting up customers, vendors and/or employees. And then they just clicked OK and there was a new field there. So that’s a way of creating your own fields.
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Now if you’re working with jobs you do have the ability to put in a description for the job, the type of job that it might be, a status, a start date, a projected end date, and an end date as well.
I’m going to go ahead and click OK and now you see I have a new customer in my list. Now something really weird that QuickBooks does is it puts the new customer at the top of the list. So if you want to sort it alphabetically just click the word Name which is the heading for that column and it will resort the list. See how it did that?
Now let’s say that I’d like to set up a job for this customer.
All I have to do is be clicked on my customer, go up to New Customer & Job and Add a Job. And let’s say this job I want to call it a Kitchen Remodel. You really don’t need to fill anything else in because it pulled in the customer information. So unless something is really different just click OK and now you’ll see you have a Kitchen Remodel job for your customer Tom Allen here.
Now let’s say that I want to add a contact. I’m going to go to the Contact tab and let’s say this is someone in the office where Tom Allen works. I’m going to go down to the bottom. See where it says Manage Contacts? If you click the arrow you can choose Add New. Now let’s say the new contact is Karen and we’ll say her last name is Smith. You can see I can put in her work phone, fax, mobile, or if I want these fields to represent something else I can certainly do that.
I can also specify at the bottom if she is the primary contact or she’s a secondary or an additional contact. Let’s leave her as the primary and save and close. And now you’ll see you have Karen Smith and she’s the primary contact.
Now I also want to set up a To Do. I’m going to click on To Do’s and notice at the bottom where it says Manage To Do’s I can create a new To Do. Now let’s say that I need to actually create an estimate for this new customer. Notice when you’re creating a To Do it can be a phone call, a fax, an email, appointment, meeting, or a task. You can also set the priority if it’s low, medium or high. We’ll say it’s high priority.
And it’s going to pull in the kitchen remodel automatically because that’s the one we were clicked on. So I can change it if I’d like. I can set a due date for this particular task and I can also put some details down here. Make sure to create a new estimate for Tom Allen. And we’ll just say for Tom here. If I want this to be something that it reminds me to do I can go ahead and specify a time and a date like I’ve got here. And also this is going to be active. If I’ve already completed this I can come in and say this has been done. But that’s how you create a To Do.
The Notes tab you’ll be able to put any notes you like. You just specify the date over here and the note and you go down to the bottom and say Add New. That’s how you’d set that up. And if you have a particular note that you wanted to be pinned you would actually just click this little pin. You’ll see it pop up there. I was showing you one earlier when we were looking at Kristy Abercrombie. So we’ll see that a little bit later.
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And I was telling you also about the sent emails. If you actually have emailed this customer then you can actually see a list here of all of those emails.
Now you also have the ability to add multiple customers at once. If I go back to Customer & Job here you might have noticed the Add Multiple Customers & Jobs. What this allows you to do is if you wanted to pull in customers or jobs that you might have in an Excel spreadsheet, for example, you can copy and paste them in here or you can actually type them. Now I’m going to go to the bottom corner and just expand this a little bit.
But if I scroll to the very bottom you’ll see that you can always type in the last line at the bottom here. And this is just giving you some little time saving tips is what they’re saying. So if you type something in and you want to copy that same information down, like if you wanted Tony’s Barbershop to go down then you would just right click and say Copy Down. But let me get out of that.
But I could type anything I want down here at the bottom and add that and then when I’m ready I would save the changes. And that way you would be able to pull all of those in whenever you wanted to. Now I’ll go ahead and close that.
So that’s a quick overview of how the Customers & Jobs actually work. Now we’re going to be using those as we finish module 4 here. So you’ll see there’s some additional ways to add a customer and job when you start working with your actual forms. So why don’t we go over into section 2 and talk a little bit about creating estimates.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!