QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Chapter 22. Customizing QuickBooks

QuickBooks comes with built-in templates for business forms and helpful shortcuts to the features you use the most. But your business isn't like anyone else's. If you run a strictly cash sales business, you couldn't care less about customer lists and invoices, but making deposits is a daily event.

You don't have to accept QuickBooks'take on convenience. The Icon Bar and Shortcut list come with a set of shortcuts, but you can add, remove, rearrange, and otherwise edit which program features appear. This chapter covers all your options.

QuickBooks'business form templates provide the basics, and they'll do if you have to blast out some invoices. When you finally find a few spare minutes, use them to customize your own templates. You can show the information you want, format the forms, and lay them out to work with your letterhead. Create as many versions as you want. For example, you can create one invoice template to print to your letterhead and another that includes your logo and company name and address for creating electronic invoices that you email. This chapter starts with the most efficient way to create forms—using built-in templates as a foundation for your own forms. But you'll also learn how to start from scratch.

Customizing the Icon Bar

When you first run QuickBooks, the Icon Bar shows up with more than a dozen icons that take you to the program's most popular features. Unless you're a keyboard shortcut fanatic, clicking Accnt on the Icon ...