Create Your Individual Invoice Template for Research and Development with Ease

Individual invoice template for Research and Development

hello and welcome to another webcast with nerd enterprises incorporated my name is Seth David and I'll be your host for the next ten minutes or so we have promised to deliver a webcast on how to customize your invoice in QuickBooks and I plan to deliver exactly that so bear with me while I get through some of the promotional stuff Saturday July 18th is our steps to success webinar you have to sign up for this webinar it's only two hours and it's only $20 and I guarantee you're gonna get something out of it you're gonna find useful that's worth twice the twenty dollars you're gonna pay for it and what's it about you can visit our website at nerd enterprises comm and find out a little bit more or if you want email us and I'll send you our Independence Day newsletter which kind of talks a little bit about that but it gives you the steps that I'm going to discuss in greater detail during the webinar the basic gist of it is this I came to California about ten years ago when I was 28 years old and I was completely broke and I built up a business little by little I started out as a full-time employee and I recognized that I wanted to do something more than I wanted to be able to create something of my own and little by little I started to build my business well fast forward till today I've got a business that's doing plenty well and a so-called bad economy and there are certain steps I've taken I believe which have been integral to creating that and developing that platform from which I can operate now and I'd like to share that with people because I think anybody can do this and it's not a matter of you having to create a business like mine you can create a business doing what you want to do take whatever it is you love to do figure out a way to make money doing it and then apply a few basic principles to growing a business and I think that's what I can share with you that you'll find valuable is you know I don't have a marketing system to sell you're not gonna make twenty thousand dollars next month if you sign up for my program it's nothing like that it's more here some of the things I've done and here are some of the programs I've used that have helped me along the way and some of the tips I've taken and use that have helped me thrive and succeed as a businessman and with that I bid you good luck I hope you sign up for the webinar I really think you'll enjoy it and get something good out of it July 18th go to the Learning Center in our website the live webinars I'll take you there at the end of this webcast but for now I want to get right into the the heart of matters here which of course is the QuickBooks how to customize your invoice webcast let's do it let's do it and if you're watching this when you're wanting to learn how to customize a webcam an invoice on this webcast there's a good chance you've already got a business and I still think you can get something out of the webinar I'm gonna share the things I'm going to share with you in the webinar on the 18th because I'm going to show you things that you can if you're not already doing them you can do them and help your business grow and even if you are already doing them I can show you how to take things to the next level in terms of the web presence and some of the other stuff now you're looking at a QuickBooks sample company file and we want to customize our invoice so invoice is a template which is in a list so we go to lists and we go to templates is that exciting that's fun then we're gonna go to templates down here and we want to go to download templates because QuickBooks has been good enough to provide us with a forum in which we can easily get templates that other people who are frankly better at this than I am have created and I'm gonna scroll down past the credit memos and the estimates and we're gonna get to the invoices and browse here find the one that you like best I'm gonna demonstrate with the one that we use for Niren enterprises incorporated we want to click the download button and save it save it save it save it we'll close that and then I can close this screen back to my templates I click templates again and now I want to choose import I click my import button I scroll down to where I saved it I click it I click open and it's going to open up the basic customization dialog for me then I'm gonna take you right into the layout designer now incidentally this is the same place you can go with a basic QuickBooks invoice template and you can clear everything out and start from scratch if you want to I just think it's handy to start with something that somebody else is already created which is plenty nice now the first thing I want to do is I want to change the background because this is a nice enough looking logo but you probably wanna put your own logo it so what you'll do is it comes up selected you'll see that I've got the whole background selected and it happens to be that that is in fact the image that's in the background if you're not sure you can do what I'm going to have you do anyway which is click here on properties and sure enough it shows you that you're looking at the properties of an image and it gives you an image of the image an image of the image that's good so we can click browse and then we can browse to our logo so and I've already got mine in there I've done this before now bear in mind I did not take the time for the purposes of this webcast to customize my logo specific for this invoice template the one that I use in real life so to speak is actually customized I've water marked it so it's a little more faint because then what I want to do is I want to enlarge this and put them in the background and then what you can do is you've got the image selected still you can right-click it and go to order and send backward that way you can make sure your image stands behind everything and again if this is properly water marked then it wouldn't be drowning out the information that's here the way it apparently is now let me cancel this and go back to the original design because I want to show you a couple of other things very quickly before we wrap up go back into the layout designer I cancelled my changes so I'm back to the original design and a few things to note what they've done I go to my Pio number data field for example I double click it and I go to my border options here and you'll see what they've done is they've chosen rounded corners and they've got medium now let's say you want to use this template but there might be data fields you want to take out and there might be new ones you want to put in well what you'll want to do that is you'll want to take note of the color that they've used on their borders we're in the borders properties click on color and go to define custom colors and you'll want to take note of these number sequences write them down on an index card or just jot them down an Excel spreadsheet so that you have them because if you bring in a new field it's going to come in with a dark border and you're going to have to customize the colors so that it matches important thing to note the other thing is it's very important is the proper balance when you're designing a template like this between the information that's on here and that's needed by the end user and balance that with having a nice-looking template it's great to have a gorgeous template but if the person who receives your invoice and who has to input that invoice into their bookkeeping system can't find the information they need it can be frustrating and sometimes I can speak from the experience of being an AP clerk where I would get an invoice and I couldn't find the four basic things that are important to be able to find when you're entering an invoice I need the invoice number I need the invoice date I need to do date and I need the amount if I can't find those four things in five seconds or less I'm gonna put it to the side and get to the rest of the pile you have to imagine that the person receiving your invoice might have a huge stack of invoices to enter and they don't have time to Oh go over how gorgeous the invoice is they might do that but more importantly they need to get the critical information that they need in order to get the invoice properly entered and that is the invoice number which you'll see right here at the top left it's very prominent the invoice date also at the top right now very prominent the balance due of course is at the very bottom here and then we have the due date in here not my ideal location but again it's balance I have a nice looking template here if I stick the due date up here under the date which is ideally where I'd like to have it it's gonna throw off the balance aesthetically of the invoice and it's not going to look that pretty so I can't necessarily have my cake and eat it too something like that bottom line is I've got the basic information that's not that difficult to find the due date here so I can click Okay on this or cancel because I haven't changed anything and that's basically how I can get in and start changing these invoices and if you want to see what it's going to look like on a preview you can click print preview here and you'll see it's a very nice professional-looking invoice QuickBooks has a habit lately of doing something weird when you go to the print preview in 2009 but here it is blown up in full view and it looks great so that's basically yet now you'll see also it didn't there's some overlapping stuff here so you can go back into the custom the the layout designer and move some things around so that you don't have that happening anymore but that's basically it so as I said you know visit us on the web go to our Learning Center you'll see that we have our live webinar scheduled in the Learning Center here go to live webinars and you'll see the three times we've scheduled July 18th these are all Pacific time 1 2 3 4 to 6 & 7 & 9 and of course while you're here have a look at some of the classes we have for download we have QuickBooks classes for download in Excel classes for download and really low prices most of them are only about $20 so join us download our classes tell me what you think I'd love to get your feedback and I look forward to seeing you around online come back next week for a great new and free webcast