QuickBooks 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 25. Customizing QuickBooks

Laid out like the workflow you use when you’re bookkeeping, the QuickBooks Home page provides instant access to all the accounting tasks you perform. You can take your pick of helpful shortcuts to your favorite features from the QuickBooks top icon bar, the new left icon bar, or from within the centers for vendors, customers, and employees.

But your business isn’t like anyone else’s. If you run a strictly cash-sales business, you couldn’t care less about customer lists and invoices; making deposits, though, is a daily event. Fortunately, you don’t have to accept QuickBooks’ initial take on convenience. The Home page and the icon bars come with a set of popular shortcuts, but you can add, remove, rearrange, and otherwise edit which features appear there. You can also add your favorite features, windows, and reports to the Favorites menu. This chapter covers all your options.

In addition to tweaking QuickBooks’ layout, you can also customize the program’s forms. QuickBooks helps you get up and running with built-in business form templates. They’ll do if you have to blast out some invoices. But when you finally find a few spare minutes, you can create templates that show the information you want, formatted the way you want, and laid out to work with your letterhead. Create as many versions as you want. For example, you can make one invoice template to print on your letterhead and another that includes your logo and company name and ...