Working with Customers and Jobs in QuickBooks 2019 – Part 2
Watch this QuickBooks 2019 training tutorial video, we will continue with setting up a new customer. We will also show you how to create new customer, how to add payment settings, sales tax settings, and job information.
We just got through talking a little bit about the Customer Center and how to go through the Customer Center and look at the screen itself and get some information.
What I’d like to do now is take you in and actually set up a customer and a job for that customer so you can see how this whole process works. We’ll be going back to the Customer Center to complete this exercise.
The way you’re going to enter a new customer in QuickBooks is to come up to this option here where it says New Customer & Job. If you click the arrow that points down here you can choose new customer from the dropdown list.
The first thing you want to do is plug in the new customer’s name. And if you remember we talked about our list being last name, comma, first name. Right? You’ll want to make sure you type it in the exact same way to keep the list consistent.
QuickBooks is not going to sort by the last name for you. You’re going to have to type it in like this.
The next thing you’ll see is the opening balance. This is designed for if the start date of your company was January the 1st of your fiscal year and Tom Allen owed you $1,000 you would plug in $1,000 as the opening balance.
Your customer’s account would be correct, however, you wouldn’t be able to go back and look and see that that was actually three different invoices that totaled $1,000. I personally don’t put anything in here and I will go enter those three invoices separately once I’ve completed setting up the new customer.
The next thing you’ll notice is you’re on the Address Info tab and here you can put in things like the company name, the customer’s name, the job title, phone, fax. You can kind of see all these fields here.
I’m going to go ahead and plug in a company name for Mr. Allen. We’re going to say it’s Allen Enterprises and then I’m going to put in Mr. Tom Allen. Now a common question at this point is if I had his name already up here why do I need to put it here?
The reason is because in a later module we’re going to talk about doing mail merges with Microsoft Word. These are the fields that we’ll pull his name from. It will not pull from this.
This name is only to go in this list so it’s important that you fill this information in as much as possible. You can also change any of these fields that you see. If you wanted the label to be different you can do that. And you’ll also notice that as you’re typing it’s prepopulating some of this address detail information for you.
You would want to go down here and actually set it up the way you’d like it to be. This is what it’s going to pull when you’re creating correspondence for Mr. Tom Allen. So you may do something like this and then you can go ahead and fill in the rest of his address information.
You really don’t need this unless you’re in a business where you have invoices that go to one address and the customer asks you ship the items to another address. If that’s the case you can copy this over and then change this information or leave it if you need to.
Let’s go on to the next tab which are the Payment Settings.
Here if you have account numbers for you customers you can plug that information in here. You can specify the payment terms. You may have some customers that you give them net 15 and others you give net 30. You can specify the delivery method.
Does this customer like things emailed, mailed to them or neither? Do they also have a preferred payment method? Do they usually pay you with cash or do they usually use their Visa card?
You can also store the customer’s credit card information right here. Now you would use this for customers who actually purchase from you on a regular basis so you don’t keep having to ask for that information again.
Even though this is a neat feature I personally would never use this because you’re liable if someone gets into your computer and gets this information regarding your customers. If you need to keep this information just keep it somewhere else and just not here in QuickBooks.
You can set a credit limit for your customer. The way that would work is if your customer credit limit was $2,000 and they purchase something that takes them over that credit limit it will pop up and tell you that and still let you sell them something else.
You can also set price levels for your customers. As an example I’ll just click Add New, but what if you decided that all your commercial customers would get a 10% discount automatically.
You might name this price level Commercial Customers and then you might say the price level will decrease by 10% and that’s all you’d have to do. You would click OK. And now QuickBooks would know that this is a commercial customer and they automatically will get 10%.
Now you also can let your customers pay you online. You would have to set up your information with Intuit and that’s done in the Preferences. But what would happen is if you’ve set it up already then you would be able to send your invoice to your customer via email, they could click a button and pay you right then and there.
The next tab over I want to talk about are your sales tax settings. If you collect sales tax from your customers there are some settings you’ll want to put here in this window. For example, are they actually a taxable customer or not? Think about this. If it’s a nonprofit organization they may have applied to be tax exempt and that’s when you’d pick nontaxable.
Also the tax item. You’re going to have to tell QuickBooks which tax item to charge this customer and we’ll talk more about that when we get to the module where we talk about sales tax.
And then you have a resale number field. If I sell chairs in my store and this customer also sells chairs they could have applied to the state for a resale certificate. And if that’s the case they wouldn’t pay sales tax when they purchase chairs from me. I could keep their resale number here just in case I ever needed it for whatever reason.
A few more things here under the Additional Info tab. You can have different types of customers and you would create this list. You’ll see in this case they have commercial customers and residential customers.
If you have sales reps that work in your organization you can create a list of your sales reps and that way you’d know which rep works with which customers.
And then also here you have these custom fields. You create whichever fields you might need in this section. The way you would do that is you would go down here to Define Fields, you would actually type the name of the field you want to create on the next line and then check off if you want to see that field when you’re working with customers, vendors and/or employees so that you don’t have to set it up three different times. And that’s how these were created right here.
One more tab is the Job Info. And let me just say if you’re creating a customer you’re not going to put job info here because these are for jobs themselves. Let me go ahead and click OK and then we’re going to set up a job so you can see how that works.
Now if you notice over here I’ve got my new customer Tom Allen. You’ll notice that it did not put Tom Allen in alphabetical order. What I can do is click this heading, the word Name here, and that will resort the list and now you’ll see he’s in the list alphabetical by last name.
Now let me show you how to set up a job for Tom Allen. We’ll set up a kitchen remodel. Make sure you’re clicked on your customer, go to the New Customer & Job tab button and this time choose Add Job.
I’m going to put in my job name which is Kitchen Remodel and you’ll notice that it really has all the other information in here. So unless something happens to be different I don’t really have to change anything.
The only thing I might choose to do is put in information about the job. I might have a description for my job, different types of jobs in the list, maybe the job status. Is it pending? Is it awarded, in progress?
A start and end date for the job. And that’s where all that job info would come in. And that’s really all you do. I’m going to click OK and now you’ll see a job called Kitchen Remodel underneath my customer Tom Allen. And that’s how you set up customers and jobs.
Now what we’re going to do is when we start talking about estimates in this next section I’m’ going to show you how you can add a customer and job on the fly so that you don’t always have to come back into this Customer Center.
Let’s go ahead and wrap up this section and let’s go to section two and talk about working with estimates.
Cindy McGuckin
Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education. Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.
