Importing customers from another program

Another easy way to get your customer list into QuickBooks very quickly is to import it directly using a spreadsheet or comma separated values file. Maybe you already exported from another customer list that you already have, in a different program. You can import it right in. To do that select File, Import Contacts. This is going to bring in add contacts dialog box. And you can choose whether you want to add them for address book, which we just did in the previous video or paste from a spreadsheet.

I am going to select from Paste from spreadsheet because you already got my spread sheet open, and this brings up a column in which you can paste in all your rose manually. I'm going to come down here to my spreadsheet. This is my existing customer list that I already had in a separate file. So I'm going to come over here. I'll start with the company column, and I can click and drag and highlight as much or as little as I want to import. When I've got all my data, select Cmd+C on the keyboard to copy it.

Come back into QuickBooks, find the corresponding column that matches up to the one that you selected. Here's the company name. Double-click on it. And now hit Cmd+V on the keyboard, this pastes in the data beautifully. So now you can just keep doing that for all your cells, that you want to import into QuickBooks. You can do as much or as little as you want. Now, because address, city, state and zip are always close to each other, I'm going to click and drag and import those all at once, by selecting all four columns, hitting Cmd+C on the keyboard, coming back to QuickBooks.

And here they are, all together like I hoped they would be. I'm going to double click Street to get into there, and now I'll click Cmd+V on the keyboard again. So this brings everything in nice and neat. There's one more thing I want to show you. If I scroll all the way over to the left, there's two things I can do. The first one is, I might have gone through all my data, especially if I was importing a lot of material. And decided that I just didn't want to import all of it. Maybe the data wasn't as clean as I thought, or as complete.

I can simply uncheck any data that I don't want to import. It'll just ignore any row that I've got unchecked. Now I can also go through, because maybe I have one giant list, of all my customers and my vendors. I can sort those out manually by using these pull downs in each row to decide whether I want to import it as a customer, vendor, or a employee. So I could go through and take my time and make sure everything matches up nicely.

When I am happy with my list I can click Import, its going to process everything and its going to tell me what it imported, so I can see that I successfully imported 19 customers and two vendors. I'll click OK and then close out of the import dialogue by clicking the X. And now I can see all my customers that I just imported, nice and quickly from an existing spreadsheet I already had. So there's no need to do the work twice. And that's how you can quickly import data right into Quickbooks.