QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Creating Items

The best time to create items is after you’ve created your accounts but before you start billing customers. Each item links to an account in your chart of accounts, so creating items goes quicker if you don’t have to stop to create an account as well.

Similarly, you can create items while you’re in the midst of creating an invoice, but you’ll find that creating items goes much faster when you create several items at once. How long it takes to create items depends on how many items you need. If you sell only a few services, a few minutes should do it. On the other hand, construction companies that need thousands of items often forego hours of data entry by importing items from third-party programs (Exporting QuickBooks Data).

Creating Multiple Items

Introduced in QuickBooks 2010, the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries feature is a real time-saver when you want to populate your Item List. If you’re comfortable working with Excel, you can set up an Excel spreadsheet and fill in values for all your items using that program’s features and shortcuts. Then, you can paste data from Excel into the table in the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window. This feature works for customer, vendor, and item lists; Adding and Editing Multiple Customer Records gives you the full scoop on how to use it.

Here’s how you get started with using Add/Edit Multiple List Entries to fill in items:

1. On the QuickBooks Home page, in the Company panel, click Items & Services.

   The Item List window opens.

2. Right-click ...