QuickBooks 2016: The Missing Manual

Chapter 27. Customizing QuickBooks

The QuickBooks Home Page is laid out like the workflow you follow when you’re bookkeeping, so it acts like a roadmap to many of the accounting tasks you perform. Shortcuts to other helpful QuickBooks features are sprinkled throughout the program’s icon bars and Vendor, Customer, and Employee centers. (Income Tracker and Bill Tracker offer several settings to control what you see about your income and expenses. To learn how to fine-tune Income Tracker and Bill Tracker, turn to Viewing Receivables with Income Tracker and Viewing Payables with Bill Tracker, respectively).

But your business isn’t like anyone else’s. For example, if you run a strictly cash-sales business, you might not care 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 stocked with a set of popular shortcuts, but you can add, remove, rearrange, and otherwise edit which features appear on them. The box on Customizing the Desktop describes several ways to customize the QuickBooks desktop. 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 ...