Create an Effective Project Invoice Template for Customer Service

Project invoice template for Customer Service

how to set up an invoice template in QuickBooks hey everyone my name is Matt holtquist with the QuickBooks University and I wanted to show you how to easily set up an invoice template in QuickBooks so we are here with QuickBooks desktop and you know QuickBooks comes with a lot of default and voices in other forms you know just in their own format but a lot of times you know most people at least a lot of people I meet business owners want to customize those invoice templates and even set up their own so that it just creates you know a better look for the company and so that's what we're going to talk about in this video today all right so first what we're going to do you go up to the list menu up here you're going to see an option here that says templates and you can see here there are lots of different this is a sample company file so when you go into you know a new company file there there will be some templates in there just the standard templates that it comes with but you can set up your own templates now what you can also do is you can edit any one of these that's also in here so custom estimate if you want to edit it you just click click here and you say edit template or you can delete them make them inactive Etc this video we're going to start from scratch we're going to do our own invoice template so what you're going to do down here you can do one of two things you can click here and click new or you can go up here and right click and click new all right so it's going to bring up the screen let me bring it over here and it's going to say okay what type of template are you creating of course we're going to choose invoice now I encourage you play around with these other ones so if you have other forms or templates you want to set up you definitely can do that in this one we are looking at the invoice now the the process is going to be the same in any of these so let's click OK and I want to bring this screen over here and it starts with this basic customization all right so this says selected template copy of new invoice template you can go down here first and you want to say a logo so if you want to use your logo I've got this one here I'm going to add my Quickbooks University Small logo I'm going to click open and you'll see that it shows up right here on the preview okay so you can load your uh upload your logo and include it on your invoices now the color scheme if you want a different color scheme than just this black they don't give you a ton of options but let's say we wanted to go with maroon we do that and you'll see there it changes to a maroon printing now most people are emailing these so the color will come through but if you're printing these just on a black and white printer it's still going to print as black and white now next thing what we can do is you want to change the font for let's say the title which is the invoice up here you can do that the company name to me that company name is very small so I want to change that I'm going to make it bold I'm going to make it 18 and it makes it much bigger so to me that just stands out more than that small default font that they have with it I'm going to leave the address and the labels as is because those fonts seem to work pretty well now if you want to include certain things on there if you want to include a fax number you know phone number email address you can see it's putting these boxes down here we can always move these around I'll show you in a minute but I like to include phone and email so that if people have questions they can contact us pretty easily if you need to update that information you can do so here and it's going to bring up the company information box that I am dragging over here so you can see you can change all this information if you want to change it on the invoice so we're going to leave that as is and then down here I always like to choose print status stamp which just tells people that you know if there's paid or pending received void so on it'll print a status stamp you can also choose print past due stamp so when it is past due you can send it to somebody and it'll show a past due stamp on here so we'll just leave that check for now now the important thing once you get all these Basics done are down here you've got additional customization and then you've got layout designer so first we're going to choose additional customization and you'll see here that it should you get to choose all sorts of things that whether you want to see it on the screen or just print now some of them are grayed out it doesn't show it on the screen but you can choose the print so all of these if you want to say okay default title is invoice you can change the title to your invoice okay just using an example here so you see it changes up here to your invoice now you've got date you've got invoice number now I don't need a PO number for what I'm doing so I'm going to take that off and you'll see that it disappears here I also don't need the project so I'm going to take that off and it puts my terms right over there now I've got my description quantity rate unit of measure and amount now I don't need the unit of measure and so I'll show you here in a minute how to get rid of that now if there's any other things on here of course you probably don't want to put your birthday or your spouse's name on there but you can choose if you need ship date ship via account number rep due date all sorts of things that you can choose and when it says screen right here that means it's going to show up on the screen when you're preparing the invoice and if you don't choose screen it's just going to print it when you actually print the invoice now if we go up here we go to columns you'll see you'll have a whole other range of items to choose now we don't need the unit of measure so I'm going to take that off and you'll see that it takes that off of the column if there are other items that you need then you can add them here okay color material Etc and you can change the order how you want the columns to show up so we've got the item the description the item is actually just on the screen it doesn't print because this is your item number internally if you wanted to print you definitely really can but so we've got description quantity rate and so you can see here we've got description quantity rate and then we've got the amount okay so that's going to show up last now progress columns if you do progress billing you can add different columns here same with sales order columns if you use sales orders and QuickBooks you can customize right here on the footer you can put a customer message you can see down on the footer that it will show you can have the subtotal sales tax total payments and balance due and then you can add customer total balance which is the original amount or the job total balance you can also add a long text which is a disclaimer now if you go over to print I suggest you use the invoice printer settings from printer setup but you can also change that print the page numbers and if you want to do trailing zeros to add additional decimal points for usually it's going to be for quantities then you can add that here as well okay so once you get all of this set up what you want to do is you want to go to the layout designer now let me pull up the layout designer and I'm going to pull that screen over here so this is where you can start moving some things around so you'll see here this kind of greenish blue space this is supposed to represent a envelope and the windows in an envelope so you can see that we're off a little bit here and so we want to kind of pull this in just a little bit maybe make it a little bit smaller and you just drag things over okay Rock Castle construction so I may have to go in and change the font on my Rock Castle construction because it's a little bit too big what I could also do I can move this over here and I can put Rock Castle construction and just move this over and then of course have my logo at the top it doesn't need to show through the window but they'll see it when they open here all right the bill 2 you can see that's all lined up that's good and we've got the date invoice number terms Etc we've got everything that we wanted on here now it's very easy to move things around so like I said earlier if we wanted to move the email we can do that here and if we want to put the phone number right next to it we can do that of course right here and then you can also if you like to you can add an extra text box a data field or an image somewhere on here all right so I'm pretty happy with this I think it looks good this is what I'd like to start using so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click ok and it's going to take me back to the additional customization so I'm going to click OK again and it's going to bring me back to the basic customization so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click OK and you'll see my copy of new invoice template right here okay so that's it so when I go into let's say I want to create um a new invoice we're going to say customers create invoices and instead of the Rock Castle I want to use my copy of new invoice template you'll see it says your invoice and this is where the screen items will show up and then once it's completed I can print it and send it I can email it and I'm good to go any questions any comments please feel free to leave those below this was a very basic overview of how to set up an invoice template in QuickBooks and I look forward to seeing you in the next video