QuickBooks 2016: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Setting Up Other QuickBooks Lists

Open any QuickBooks window, dialog box, or form, and you’re bound to bump into at least one drop-down list. These lists make it easy to fill in transactions and forms. Creating an invoice? If you pick the customer and job from the Customer:Job drop-down list, QuickBooks fills in the customer’s address, payment terms, and other fields for you. Selecting payment terms from the Terms List tells the program how to calculate an invoice’s due date. If you choose an entry in the Price Level List, QuickBooks calculates the discount or markup you extend to your customers for the goods they buy. Even the products and services you sell to customers come from the Item List, which you learned about in Chapter 5.

In this chapter, you’ll discover what many of these lists can do for you and learn whether it makes sense for you to set them up for your business. Because some lists have their own unique fields (such as the Price Level Type for a Price Level entry), you’ll also find out what the various fields are for and how to fill them in. If you already know which lists and list entries you want, you can skip to Managing Lists to master the techniques that work for most lists, such as adding and tweaking entries, hiding entries, and so on. Once you know how to work with one QuickBooks list, the doors to almost every other list open, too.

Note

A few lists—such as the Customer, Vendor, and Employee lists—behave a little differently from the ones described ...