QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Setting Up Other QuickBooks Lists

Open any QuickBooks window, dialog box, or form, and you’re bound to bump into at least one list. These drop-down lists make it easy to fill in transactions and forms. Creating an invoice? If you pick the customer and job from the Customer:Job List, QuickBooks fills in the customer’s address, payment terms, and other fields for you. Selecting the payment terms from the Terms List tells QuickBooks how to calculate the due date for the invoice. If you choose an entry in the Price Level List, QuickBooks calculates the discount you extend to your customers for the goods they buy. Even the products and services you sell to your customers come from the Item List, which you learned about in Chapter 5.

In this chapter, you’ll discover what the different lists actually do for you and whether you should bother setting them up for your business. Because some lists have their own unique fields (such as the Price Level Type for a Price Level entry), you’ll also learn what the various fields do and how to fill them in. If you already know which lists and list entries you want, you can skip to Creating and Editing List Entries on page 148 to master the techniques that work for most lists in QuickBooks, such as adding and tweaking entries, hiding entries, and so on. Once you learn how to work with one QuickBooks list, the doors to almost every other list open, too.

Note

The Customer, Vendor, and Employee lists are the exceptions. Although you’ll ...