QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Customizing Forms

Everything you do says something about your business—even the forms you use. For a small company or someone with spectacularly bad taste, the built-in QuickBooks invoices and other forms work just fine. But if you want business forms that convey your sense of style and attention to detail, customized forms are the way to go.

In QuickBooks, form customization comes in several shapes and sizes, described in detail in the sections that follow:

• QuickBooks Form Design. The QuickBooks Forms Customization online tool helps you produce consistent, professional-looking business forms. Unlike a form template, which specifies everything about one form (content, formatting, and layout), a form design specifies form appearance; including background (like a watermark), logo, colors, fonts, and the format of the grid that holds your data. The step-by-step process is easy to follow and when you’re done, you can save the design and apply it to all the forms in your QuickBooks company file in one fell swoop. From then on, you choose the forms you want to use as you would normally (Choosing an invoice template).

  Note

  Don’t expect miracles from form designs. The formatting you can choose is limited. If you want to get fancy, use the customization tools within QuickBooks, which are described in the following sections and in online Appendix E (www.missingmanuals.com/cds).

• Basic customization. If you don’t use QuickBooks Form Design, you can make the same kinds of design changes within QuickBooks: ...