Create the Perfect Invoice Layout for Planning Your Projects

Invoice layout for Planning

hi i'm rachel from gentle frog and in today's video of QuickBooks training I'm going to talk to you about how to customize an invoice in QuickBooks desktop [Music] so I've opened up a sample file of QuickBooks desktop sample rockcastle construction on the top ribbon I'm gonna click on the word lists and then I'm gonna go down to templates on the bottom the first invoice I want to show you is the Rockcastle invoice just so you can see what we're starting with for a default invoice so I'm finding Rockcastle invoice in the list and I'm just gonna double click on it to open it I can see my Rockcastle invoice on the right-hand side I'm gonna click on print premium so it's easier to see so this is what it looks like it's a pretty plain invoice there are things that we can do to kind of spruce it up and make it look a little bit more interesting and make it look less like every other invoice out there so I'm gonna select close and start fiddling with it I can add a logo to my invoice to do that I'm going to click on use logo on the left hand side and then it gives me an opportunity to select my logo I don't currently have a logo within this folder so I'm just gonna navigate to where my logo is located in this case on my desktop so sample logo it says it's now saving that into the folder that I originally opened for us and I'm gonna say okay so my sample logo is a smiley face just cuz I wanted something fun so I can change my color scheme right now it's black go ahead and make it green because I like the color green and then I can change my fonts if I want I don't I can update my information I don't really want to do that right now but you certainly can so when you do that you can say oh my address is different so we'll say it's light we'll just give a bellevue address so now I can see that my text is green I've given a different zip code let me do some other fun stuff let me change the layout so right now like there's a gap between my business name and my address this information over here in the middle is kind of scooted out on the in the weird way to the middle so when I click on layout designer I'm able to move stuff around to make it make more sense the first thing I see is these I could have soft green boxes the soft green boxes mean that that's where your paper would line up to a windowed envelope if you were printing and mailing these invoices in most cases at this point were emailing invoices so the soft green boxes don't matter as much but definitely if you're gonna print these out and put them in windowed envelopes you do want to pay attention to those soft green boxes so what I want to do is I want to move stuff around like I want to move up my address so that it doesn't look quite so strange I can also move this stuff around so say for example I want it all to be lined up on the left hand side I'm I'm just pulling the boxes I'm clicking and dragging them over so I'm giving them spaces because they're independent boxes you can pretty much do whatever you want with these so I'm not going to modify this invoice to make it totally perfect I'm just modifying it so you can see what you can do to modify things so if I wanted to change the width of this box I can let me click on okay so I can take you back to the text I can click on the bottom for additional customization which would give me a chance to change up some of the text so in the upper right hand corner it's called invoice maybe I'd like to call it invoice ticket the date the dates and capslock maybe I find capslock to be just a little bit too scream efore me I can change it to lowercase I can change this to be ticket number i've got built to and shipped to in my real business i teach people how to use QuickBooks so there is never a ship to so I can uncheck the boxes first ship to because I just don't need it terms that's just saying what what terms are you giving someone what due dates so I'm asking you to pay within 30 days or within 15 days or pay immediately so we'd leave that there and then the due date that's automatically calculated we would leave that there if I had a rep like a contact person I can check that box when I check in the box for a wrap it gave me a warning message saying this is laying over the top of thing else and I can see that's true to fix it I can click on layout designer come into here and then I can scoot the boxes over so you can line up your your boxes to be however you want you can organize them to be wherever you like them would be located you can change the text so new text so I've see project is on my screen but maybe my situation doesn't call for projects I can just uncheck that and it takes it off of my screen now of course my boxes are messed up and I'd want to go back and change those again but basically this is just an example of how you can change the text and move the boxes around you can click on columns and choose to reorder stuff you can choose to take stuff off of here so maybe you have it appear on your screen but you don't have it up here on the invoice so maybe unit of measurement I need it on my screen but I don't need on my invoice maybe quantity I don't need on my invoice maybe amount I don't maybe I want amount but I don't want rate whatever makes sense for your business on the bottom of my screen I've got the footer so I could include this information down here so the total amount of the invoice any payments that have been applied to the invoice the balance due if that doesn't apply to your business you can always uncheck those things so now you just have a subtotal the amount of tax if applicable and then the grand total you can put a disclaimer in this case I'm just gonna type sample text and now you see it appear at the bottom of your screen looks a little silly to have it hanging out on the bottom what I would probably do is go into layout designer and drag all these boxes down so that this wasn't hanging out by itself I can click print preview anytime I want to see how it might look for my client I can see that it's green I can see my boxes need to be fixed a little bit you can spend hours customizing this and I definitely encourage you to I just wanted to show you a couple of quick things so that you can create the invoice kind of make it your own and then tweak and adjust it as necessary thank you very much if you have other videos you'd like to see please don't hesitate to let me know thanks [Music] [Music]