QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Hiding and Deleting Customers

Hiding customers isn't about secreting them away when the competition shows up to talk to you. Because you can delete customers only in very limited circumstances, hiding customers keeps your list of customers manageable and is a much easier way to prevent selecting inactive customers by mistake.

Figure 3-11. Top: To hide a customer, in the Customer:Job List, right-click the customer and choose Make Inactive from the shortcut menu. The customer and any associated jobs disappear from the Customer:Job List. Bottom: To view all customers, at the bottom of the Customer:Job List window, select the Include Inactive checkbox. QuickBooks adds a column with an X as its heading and displays an X in that column for every inactive customer in the list.

Deleting Customers

You can delete a customer only if there is no activity for that customer in your QuickBooks file. If you try to delete a customer that has even one transaction, QuickBooks warns you that you can't delete the record.

If you create a customer by mistake, you can remove it—as long as you first remove any associated transactions, which are likely to be mistakes as well. But QuickBooks doesn't go so far as to tell you which transactions are preventing you from deleting this customer. To see all the transactions for the customer, run the Transaction List by Customer Report (described on page 469). In the report, ...