QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Hiding and Deleting Items

Deleting items and hiding them are two totally different actions, although the visible result is the same—QuickBooks doesn’t display the items in the Item List window or item drop-down lists. The only time you’ll delete an item is when you create it by mistake and want to eliminate it permanently from the Item List. As you might discover when you attempt to delete an item, you can only delete an item if you’ve never used it in a transaction.

Hiding items doesn’t have the same restrictions as deleting them, and offers a couple of advantages to boot. First, when you hide items, they don’t appear in your Item List, which prevents you from selecting them accidentally. And unlike deleting, hiding is reversible: You can switch items back to active status if you start selling them again. Suppose you hid the item for bell-bottom hip-huggers in 1974. Decades later, when ’70s retro becomes cool again, you can reactivate the item and use it on sales forms. (Of course, you’ll probably want to edit the cost and sales price to reflect today’s higher prices.)

Hiding Items

As mentioned above, if you’ve sold an item in the past, then the only way to remove it from the Item List is to hide it. Hiding items means that your Item List shows only the items you currently use, so you’ll scroll less to find the items you want and you’re less likely to pick the wrong item by mistake. If you start selling an item again, you can reactivate it so that it appears on the Item List once ...