QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Customers in QuickBooks

If bringing in business were as easy as creating customers in QuickBooks, sales of QuickBooks would propel Intuit past Microsoft as the software company with the largest market capitalization. Face facts—you still have to convince customers to work with your company. But once you've cleared that hurdle, you create customers in QuickBooks so you can charge for the products you sell and the services you deliver.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT : How Many Names?

If you're a big fish in the small business pond, limitations on the number of names can cause problems. In QuickBooks Professional and Premier Editions, any single name list, such as the Customer:Job or Vendor lists, can contain only 10,000 names. However, the total number for all name lists combined (customers, vendors, and products) is 14,500. To make matters worse, once you reach the limit, not only can you not add more names, deleting existing names doesn't even free up slots in the names list.

Here are a few techniques you can use to avoid this maddening behavior:

• Conserve customer names. You can prevent excessive consumption of these precious customer names by creating one customer to represent many individual sales. For example, you can aggregate all your cash sales under one customer, called Cash Sales. Mind you, by doing so, you can't produce sales reports by customer name, although you can add the buyer's name to Memo fields in sales forms to maintain some documentation of who purchased what. ...