Customizing invoices and forms in QuickBooks

You can customize the forms that you send to your customers in QuickBooks such as invoices and estimates. To customize a form, you first need to enter that module. For example, to customize an invoice, click Create Invoices. At the top title bar, it usually defaults to this main tab, but instead we're going to change to the formatting tab. This is going to bring up a new menu of options. From here, select Manage Templates. This brings up all the templates for the invoice module. Remember when we could change to a certain template, such as a Packing Slip, this is where we go to create new ones and modify existing ones.

So for now, I'm going to create a new one, because I want to create a template for Two Trees Olive Oil, and one that I can put my logo on. I'll start with the Professional Invoice as a base, and I'll click Copy. Instantly at the top I can see my copy, and here's where I can come over on the right hand side and change the template name, so that's the first thing I'm going to do. I'll call it Two Trees Invoice. I can see how it's going to look on the right hand side, and to actually get in and edit it in the select template area on the left hand side, once we rename the template name, it'll show up in alphabetical order on the left hand side instantly.

Double click it, and that's going to bring us in to the basic customization screen. The first thing we can do is add a logo. Place a checkbox next to Use Logo. And it's going to bring up the Browse dialogue box so that you can go in and browse your file systems to select the image that you want to use. In this case, I already knew where to go and find my company logo. If it didn't bring up that dialogue, just click Select Logo. You'll notice that the preview updates instantly, the logo appears next to my address on the left-hand side. I can select a color scheme.

I can also change the fonts for my address and name. Right underneath that, here is where I decide what basic information I want to show up on the invoice. It defaults to showing up my company name and address. Now if I didn't put that information into QuickBooks already, I can do it here by clicking Update Information. I can also put in the website address so I can add more fields at any time by placing check boxes next to them. Now once I clicked on website address I'm going to get the Layout Designer warning. It's just letting me know that I can use the layout designer to reposition any fields that overlap on this preview on the right hand side.

Click OK. And as it updated I can see what they were talking about. Down here in the bottom right hand side it put in my website address but it put it in a very bad spot, we can change this. Click Layout Designer in the bottom middle of the screen, and here's where we can actually start customizing where things can go. I can take any item here and select it and re-size it, reposition it or drag it anywhere I want to. For example, I'll click on this Two Trees logo that we put in and I'll drag it all the way over to the right hand side of the screen.

I can also scroll down. And here's this website field. Now, it was put into the wrong place, so I can drag it somewhere else. Here's the label, and here's the actual URL. I can put those wherever I want or if I decide that I don't want them, I can click on them and hit the Delete key. I’m going to scroll back to the top of the screen because I want to show you that finally you can also add information. I'll click the drop-down arrow next to Add and I can add a text box, an image or a data field if I want to put more fields on this invoice.

I’ll click Data Field and here's where I am given a list of all the possible fields that I could add on to my invoice. For example, a Sales Tax field, a Terms field. I'll select Terms and click OK. Here's my field, and I can bring it and line it up somewhere on my invoice and make it look nice. If I let go, it gets added. I'll click the blue OK button. And here's where I can see the finished product of what my invoice is going to look like. When I'm done, click OK. And now when I create invoices, in the template list, in addition to all the ones that we saw in the beginning of the videos, I can now see and pick my Two Trees invoice.

So if I choose a customer and pick an item and add it to my invoice, if I choose my two trees template and change back to that main tab, I can now select Print > Preview and this is what its going to look like. It creates my template, here is the Terms field that we added, here is the logo field that we added and any other changes we made would be shown here. I'll click Close, I'll close out of this, and I won't save it. And now you can go through and change and update all your forms to the look and feel of your company.