QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Hiding and Deleting Customers

Hiding customers isn’t about secreting them away when the competition shows up to talk to you. Because QuickBooks lets you delete customers only in very limited circumstances, hiding customers helps keep your list of customers manageable and your financial history intact. This section explains your options.

Deleting Customers

You can delete a customer only if there’s no activity for that customer in your QuickBooks file. If you try to delete a customer that has even one transaction, QuickBooks tells you that you can’t delete that record.

If you create a customer by mistake, you can remove it, as long as you first remove any associated transactions—which are likely to be mistakes as well. But QuickBooks doesn’t tell you which transactions are preventing you from deleting this customer. To delete transactions that prevent you from deleting a customer:

1. View all the transactions for the customer by selecting that customer in the Customer Center, and then setting the Show box to All Transactions and the Date box to All, as shown in Figure 4-14.

   You can also view transactions by running the “Transaction List by Customer” report (Reports→Customers & Receivables→Transaction List by Customer).

   

   Figure 4-14. When you select a customer in the Customer Center, the transaction pane in the lower-right shows that customer’s transactions. To see them all, in the Show drop-down list, choose All Transactions, and in the Date drop-down list, choose All.

2. In the Customer Center or the report, open the transaction you want to delete by double-clicking it.

   The Create Invoices window (or the corresponding transaction window) opens to the transaction you double-clicked.

3. Choose Edit→Delete Invoice (or Edit→Delete Check, or the corresponding delete command).

   In the message box that appears, click OK to confirm that you want to delete the transaction. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for every transaction for that customer.

4. Back on the Customers & Jobs tab, select the customer you want to delete, and then press Ctrl+D or choose Edit→Delete Customer:Job.

   If the customer has no transactions, QuickBooks asks you to confirm that you want to delete the customer. Click Yes.

   If you see a message telling you that you can’t delete the customer, go back to steps 2 and 3 to delete any remaining transactions.

Hiding and Restoring Customers

Although your work with a customer might be at an end, you still have to keep records about your past relationship. But old customers can clutter up your Customer Center, making it difficult to select active customers. Hiding such customers is a better solution than deleting them, because QuickBooks retains the historical transactions for that customer, so you can reactivate them if they decide to work with you again. And hiding removes customer names from all the lists that appear in transaction windows so you can’t select them by mistake.

To hide a customer, in the Customer Center, right-click the customer and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Make Customer:Job Inactive. The customer and any associated jobs disappear from the list. Figure 4-15 shows you how to unhide (reactivate) customers.

Figure 4-15. To make hidden customers visible again and reactivate their records, in the View drop-down list, choose All Customers. QuickBooks displays an X to the left of every inactive customer in the list. Click that X to restore the customer to active duty.