QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Transaction Timesavers

QuickBooks can zip you through the two basic ways of distributing invoices and other sales forms: on paper and electronically. But within those two distribution camps, you can choose to send your forms as soon as you’ve completed them or place them in a queue to send in batches. For sporadic sales forms, it’s easier to print or email them as you go. But when you generate dozens or even hundreds of sales orders, invoices, or statements, printing and emailing batches is a much better use of your time.

When you have workhorse transactions that you enter again and again, QuickBooks can memorize them and then fill in most, if not all, of the fields in future transactions for you. For transactions that happen on a regular schedule—like monthly customer invoices or vendor bills—the program can remind you when it’s time to record the transaction, or even add the transaction without any help from you. But you can also memorize transactions that you use occasionally, such as estimates, and call on them only when you need them.

QuickBooks’ search features can also save you time, which you can appreciate if you’ve ever hunted frantically for a transaction. Whether you want to correct a billing problem on a customer’s invoice, check whether you paid a vendor’s bill, or look for the item you want to add to an estimate, QuickBooks gives you several ways to search: You can look for different types of transactions within various date ranges in the Customer, Vendor, ...