QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Finding Transactions

When you want to answer a customer’s question about what they owe, it’s easier if you have the invoice in front of you. The Create Invoices window shows only one invoice at a time, which can mean some furious clicking if you’re trying to find one specific invoice out of the hundreds you’ve sent. Whether you want to find overdue invoices, purchase orders, or paychecks, the Customer, Vendor, and Employee Centers make it easy to find transactions for a particular customer, vendor, or employee. The Item List window also has a few tools for finding the items you want.

QuickBooks also offers two additional commands for searching. The Search command scours every inch of QuickBooks and your company file. The Find command, on the other hand, is best suited for more precise searches—to find a specific invoice number, invoices overdue more than a certain number of days, and so on. This section explains how to use all these features.

Searching with QuickBooks’ Centers

The Customer Center is a quick way to answer basic questions about your customers like “What sales orders are still open?” or “Has the customer paid all the invoices I’ve sent?” Likewise, you can track down bills, bill payments, and other vendor transactions in the Vendor Center. The Employee Center performs similar tasks for transactions like paychecks and non-payroll transactions.

Here are ways you can use QuickBooks’ centers to find transactions, using the Customer Center as an example (to open it, on the Home ...