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    Part I: Getting Started > Setting Up Customers and Jobs

    Chapter 4. Setting Up Customers and Jobs

    You may be fond of strutting around your sales department proclaiming, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something!” As it turns out, you can quote that tired adage in your accounting department, too. Whether you sell products or services, the first sale to a new customer can initiate a flurry of activity, including creating a new customer in QuickBooks, assigning a job for the work, and the ultimate goal of all this effort—invoicing your customer (sending a bill—a.k.a. invoice—for your services and products that states how much the customer owes) to collect some income.

    The people who buy what you sell have plenty of nicknames: customers, clients, consumers, patrons, patients, purchasers, donors, members, shoppers, and so on. QuickBooks throws out the thesaurus and applies one term—customer—to every person or organization that buys from you. In QuickBooks, a customer is a record of information about your real-life customer. The program takes the data you enter about customers and fills in invoices and other sales forms with your customers’ names, addresses, payment terms, and other info. If you play it safe and define a credit limit, QuickBooks even reminds you when orders put customers over their limits.

    Real-world customers are essential to your success, but do you need customers in QuickBooks? Even if you run a primarily cash business, creating customers in QuickBooks could still be a good idea. For example, setting up QuickBooks records for the repeat customers at your store saves you time by automatically filling in their information on each new sales receipt, so you have time to do more important things. (If you have a point-of-sale system, like QuickBooks POS, you can track customer sales there instead and leave customers out of QuickBooks completely.)

    WORD TO THE WISE: Making Customers Easy to Identify

    In QuickBooks, the Customer Name field doesn’t show the name that appears on invoices; it displays a code that uniquely identifies each of your customers so it’s easy to tell them apart.

    If you own a small company with only a few customers, you’re not likely to mistakenly create multiple records for the same customer. Because your customer list is short, you know which ones you’ve created and you can see them without scrolling in the Customer Center (Figure 4-1). Even so, it’s a good idea to define a standard for customer names. Perhaps you hide customers you haven’t worked with in a while, or you have so many customers that it takes all day to scroll through the list.

    Consistent naming can help you avoid having multiple records for the same customer by preventing you from creating slightly different values in the Customer Name field for that customer. For example, you could end up with three customers in QuickBooks all representing the same events organizer, such as Cales’s Capers, Cales Capers, and CalesCapers.

    QuickBooks doesn’t enforce naming conventions. After you define rules that work for your business, you have to be disciplined and apply those rules each time you create a new customer. You’re free to use alphanumeric characters and punctuation in customer names. Here are a few of the more common naming conventions:

    • The first few letters of the customer’s company name followed by a unique numeric identifier. This standard is easy to apply and differentiates customers as long as their names don’t all begin with the same words. For example, if most of your customers are wine stores with unimaginative owners, your customer names could end up as Wine001, Wine002, and Wine003. But if your customers are Zinfandels To Go, Merlot Mania, and Cabernet Cabinet, this system works nicely.

    • For individuals, the last name followed by the first name and a numeric ID to make the name unique. Although unusual names such as Zaphod Beeblebrox render a numeric ID unnecessary, using this standard ensures that all customer names are unique.

    • The actual company name with any punctuation and spaces omitted. Removing spaces and punctuation from company names helps eliminate multiple versions of the same name. If you choose this convention, using capital letters at the beginning of each word (called camel caps) make the name more readable. For instance, Icantbelieveitsyogurt is a headache waiting to happen, but ICantBelieveItsYogurt looks much like its spaced and punctuated counterpart.

    • A unique alphanumeric code. Customer:Job drop-down menus (which you’ll find throughout QuickBooks) and reports sort customers by the Customer Name field. Codes like X123Y4JQ use only a few characters to produce unique identifiers, but they’re also so cryptic that they make it difficult to pick out the customer you want in drop-down lists, or to sort reports in a meaningful way. Stick with using part of the customer’s name (at the beginning of the name, since names appear alphabetically) unless you have hundreds or thousands of customers.


    If, on the other hand, your business revolves around projects, you can create a job in QuickBooks for each project you do for a customer. To QuickBooks, a job is a record of a real-life project that you agreed (or perhaps begged) to perform for a customer—remodeling a kitchen, designing an ad campaign, or whatever. Suppose you’re a plumber and you regularly do work for a general contractor. You could create several jobs, one for each place you plumb: Smith house, Jones house, and Winfrey house. In QuickBooks, you can then track income and expenses by job and gauge each one’s profitability. However, some organizations don’t track jobs, and if your company is one of those, you don’t have to create jobs in QuickBooks. For example, retail stores sell products, not projects. If you don’t need jobs, you can simply create your customers in QuickBooks and then move on to invoicing them or creating sales receipts for their purchases.

    This chapter guides you through customer and job creation. It also helps you decide how to apply QuickBooks’ customer and job fields in your business.