Create a QuickBooks Estimate Template for Technical Support Effortlessly

Quickbooks estimate template for Technical Support

foreign customization template modification inside of QuickBooks so it's something that we do frequently here at four lane because one of the things that we like talking about is how you can get the mo you know the most data more data out of your system because if you have data then you can make decisions quickly and so some of that comes in play with forms customization I've done some other videos as well things like how to do reporting or you know what do what are the fields that matter you know stuff like that um this kind of Falls in line with that as well so I'm gonna try and spend as much time in product as always and I'm also going to apologize ahead of time I do have a little bit of a cough so I hope to get that mute button fast enough but I've been fighting this for a couple weeks okay so I'm Marjorie I'm gonna be leaving your webinar today uh just a little overview about four lane I know we switch this up every once in a while just wanted to remind people why they choose to work with four lane in the QuickBooks Enterprise space first and foremost is that we've been the number one reseller of QuickBooks Enterprise since 2010. not because we're a sales agency right and we do sales but mainly because we service the products so well right and so the sales kind of comes with that um we are Erp Consultants we maximize QuickBooks and then if QuickBooks is not the right fit anymore we can go beyond it into products like netsuite and accumatica we're experts in accounting and software so once you leave the QuickBooks space what you find a lot of times is you you find that there's somebody who knows how to do the system setup you know click all the buttons and then there's somebody else who knows how to do like the month and close so there's two different people involved in that um and that's not how we roll we like to be the one person and of course change is all the time especially when you're dealing with anything software or technology related so we help alleviate some of that pain of the change so okay what are we going to be going over today uh so we're going to be talking about the templates list duplicating templates and things to be aware of there customizing some forms I'm going to give you some examples of things that I've seen our clients do that has worked well for them other fields versus custom fields and then customer messages versus text boxes there's gonna be some other things in here too but just at a high level all right let me go ahead and dive in product here so I'm going to start things off with just where where are these right so of course when you go into any not any most transaction types any transaction type that you would expect to be customer facing right so um receive payments can be customer facing because in the received payment we might send them a receipt sales receipts definitely customer facing because we might print them out at the point of sale when they are purchasing from us um doesn't mean that they're all customer based but they can be those are the forms that we would most likely customize purchase orders and I'm sorry I shouldn't say customer face and I should say external facing purchase orders external facing they could be going to vendors so they have the ability to modify those templates um bills usually somebody's sending us the template for a bill right so we wouldn't need to print a build template out to send to an external source I mean maybe an auditor or something but you know we wouldn't need that so those you can't you don't customize I mean you have some customization in there but they don't have a form customization template customization um so where do we go to customize uh you can open the transaction up right so you go on the transaction and then they have a formatting tab where we can go in and see some of the things we're going to be able to see manage templates it takes us to the list you can download templates there are some things online where people have set up templates with different views different colors um and so you can go in and download it's kind of similar to like if you're in PowerPoint or something and you know they have some preset PowerPoint templates that you can use um so you can do that we're not going to talk about that today though um and then you have customized data layout okay so that's what we're going to be spending most of our time in um so let me go ahead and close out of that so any of these sales orders estimate purchase orders you're going to see that formatting tab where I like to do list customization is or Temple customizations just come in here to my templates list okay if I'm doing something quick on the Fly right or if I'm doing training or design for a customer new setup I'll do it right from that transaction because we're talking about modifying this transaction but the best practice is really to come in and set one of these templates up because you have a brand you have a color scheme you have a logo you have terminology that is specific to your business or to the business that you're working with and you want to set up the majority of that one time so I can set it up on a sales order and then I can duplicate it all right come into templates and duplicate it and it'll maintain the design in the additional template so it's great to do them kind of all at once right uh so this templates list a couple things just a note here so you can see you can have multiple templates it you can come in and make a template inactive so if I made this product one inactive pops up off of my list I can show inactive templates so you can see all of the inactive ones that I have set up in here um best practice a lot of times for us is to go in and inactivate any of the like standard Intuit ones right into a professional invoice into a service invoice because we want to be using ours the ones that are ours will rename something like four lane invoice right or four lane wholesale invoice versus four lane retail invoice or something like that so we'll call it four lines it's a little bit easier but it's really best practice to inactivate the ones that you are not using so it's just not a choice right it's a lot easier for people who are doing data entry to not have a choice it's much more simple if you just have one um okay so templates list in here um as I was saying before you can go in and duplicate right so usually everything you can do and you saw me do this even everything you do in here usually you can right click and it's the same as what you're going to see down here this case not so if you right click you don't see duplicate in there but if you come down to this template then we do have duplicate there the one thing to take note of when you're doing you know again this process would be I go in I set up a template add in all my colors do all the things that I want to and then I want to maintain that design across my other templates so I go in and I create a duplicate when you create a duplicate the thing that you have to be aware of it pops up and says okay what type of template are you going to duplicate it to so I have my custom fills where they created and I also want to carry that forward onto an invoice okay now again you can go in and still modify the invoice once you do this but it'll carry forward any of those color schemes logos Etc the one thing that you have to be aware of so dig copy of custom sales order now when I go in and edit this template though some of the things will carry forward right like instead of it being called an invoice it carries forward sales order so you do have to go in and edit it and fix some of these things but it will carry for that color scheme and the color scheme is really the hardest part right formatting anything is super annoying so um that's why we still recommend building that base template duplicating it and then making the small modifications that you need to make um once that is in a different template type hopefully that makes sense hopefully that makes sense if it doesn't make sense paying some stuff into questions and let me know um okay I do have a question here so I'll pause so it says can you copy a form template set it from one company file to another company file and change the logo or do you have to reinvent the wheel so we do have export templates this is something that you can do the only thing that you have to be aware of is if there are custom Fields being used on that template then they do not go across like there's some warnings there um because the custom Fields uh right may or may not be set up in the other templates are in the other files so usually that's a preventative there it's always worth testing so yeah you can export some I wonder if that's would you want to do that for like if you're going across companies I know one of the things that we're doing in the next week right we're talking about intercompany transactions so maybe taking a base template and moving it across we have for some clients before when we're doing new file setups for them um and we try to export templates it'll give you a warning and tell you about you know there's custom Fields we'll go in and we'll we'll take the custom Fields off the template because again the formatting is just so frustrating um and so we'll take those off the template export the template move it over and then put them back on the template so it's just a couple fields we need to add after the fact so quick little tips there okay all right so let's go ahead in and customize the form so I'm going to start with the sales order just because I love sales order so much um so I'm just going to choose any of these and edit the template so the first screen that always opens up is the basic customization which I'm sure you guys have gone through this I'm going to go through at a high level most of the stuff is pretty straightforward um but the things that I want you to be aware of so adding a logo you can add a logo through here you can also add images in the layout designer um so me you get to decide what's most important which are you know which way you want to do it I do most of my things through the layout designer usually when I'm doing designs um just because you can hit on everything like if I add a logo from here and I select my logo the pictures and add in the logo right I have to still go into layout designer to make it look okay so I usually just add them in layout designer and then you can see you can add change fonts in here but same thing you can do all of this stuff in the lab designer directly it makes it a lot more simple um the second area so this is basic customization and then the second area we talk about is additional customization so this is where I spend the majority of our time usually with customers when we are doing design um when I'm actually with the customer on the call and that's because this is where we want to use our terminology that we care about right so what's the title sales order my customers don't call them sales orders they call them whatever it is right so that's what they know it as so you can change the terminology there and terminology is very important um when you know we're communicating with people externally especially we wanted them to not have to call us and be like what is it we don't want them to have to do that um they you know sales order number um it's funny to me how there are opportunities to remove things right like sales order number to me I would think you have to have that on a transaction you have to include the transaction number on the transaction it has to be printed but I mean you could take it off kind of strange but you can um the fields here down the left side what you're seeing these are the field titles right what they are in QuickBooks not actually what the field titles are if you go through the API but it's what we understand them to be then they have the column here that says do you want to see this on the screen so what that means is when I'm entering a sales order do I want to see this field and then if I'm going to print it out right into PDF if I'm going to email it out do I want it to be on the preview that goes out externally somewhere else the reasons why we might have something on the screen internally is it's information like maybe you have a notes field or maybe in the description it says you know make sure that you do one two three before adding this to any quote um so you want whoever's entering it to see that data but then we don't print that out because we don't want our customers to see it okay um so biggest thing with this is what Fields do we want to see internally on the screen and why I recommend simple simple as is best if you don't need somebody to see this field take it away right get rid of it simple is best don't over complicate that just results in more phone calls um so what do you want to see on the screen what would you like to print out and then changing the verbiage so that it is something that applies in your business okay now coming down below here um we have this field well I won't get into Heather there again let me just finish up this top so we have headers right so the headers is anything that goes on the top of a transaction these are things that are entered one time on a transaction right like there's only going to be one sales order number there's only going to be one ship date there's only going to be one sales rep for the entire transaction unless we're doing some customization okay but the sales rep field that table one time on the transaction then we have columns columns are used down below and these can be shown or used multiple times on a transaction okay so I have a line chosen item and then the next on the same line it shows the description shows the you know cost it shows the amount all of those things are shown and then on the next line I go to another item a different description a different cost multiple times yeah and this is also a great place to rename so manufacturer's part number as an example we want to show that on here customers aren't used to you know or maybe we don't actually have a manufacturer's part number in here but customers know this skew a different way right so I have my item which is my SKU and I actually don't want to print my SKU name but I want to print out a different SKU that customers are used to seeing on the web store whatever I put in here SKU and use that field in a different way right and print that field instead of the item type thing all these pop-ups by the way you can say don't display these in the future they're just warning you like hey don't forget you just added this you might want to move it around so go to the layout designers what it's telling you to okay so headers and columns there on um the the additional tabs here footer right you have some plain text we can include the customer message which we'll talk about in a minute and then some print options as well I'm not really going to go through those kinds of things um so a couple things about fields um so we have these fields that you see called other this is one of the things whenever we're reviewing somebody's file we look at the most because other fields right are kind of like custom fields but they're not consistent right on a custom field I can go into the customer four lane and I can put in a custom field you know services or whatever it is I want to put in there services company and I can have it default fill in on every template that every time sales order goes out to four lane I want that information to fill in so it is a consistency thing right so custom fields are consistent other fields when you insert an other field on a transaction you put other you can call it whatever you want like service type whatever you want to call it in here but the thing about these is that they aren't going to be consistent so you will be typing this in on every transaction now I understand that there could be things that you want to track on every transaction um but I struggle with this because this field this other field right like looking at data why are we putting data in the system generally we're putting data in the system so that we can report on the data right if it's a if it's a note that we want to provide to a customer um the description field is the most lengthiest field we can have and you can insert a line of just a blank line and put a description without putting an item right okay um so I struggle with this other field for for the reason of consistency because I cannot be consistent whereas with a custom field if I go into a custom field on a customer let me go into a customer and the way to say it set up a custom field right is you open any customer go to additional info and then Define fields now you can choose in custom fields to say any text if you choose to put any text it this field this custom field becomes very similar to another field which is somebody can just type something in every time but having somebody can cite something in every time first of all makes it so that um they have to think about it right like if we're able to provide a multiple choice list they don't have to think about it because they only have these choices they don't have to think about like what am I supposed to put in this field um the other thing is then you can have consistency so in customers a great one that we say is you know lead source so we come in and we want to add this to customers we want to use a multiple choice list um you know Google or PPC uh radio um referral um social media I would joke about that one I guess uh okay so we're gonna add in this multiple choice list of lead source that allows for that consistency also I could preset lead Source in here radio so that every time the customer shows up that's what's going to fill in on the template or I could leave it blank and not have anything in there right and then um just fill it in on the template itself okay now lead Source obviously that's really like a one-time thing um so you probably want to fill it in here so we do see a lot of people use those other fields um where's my I not have my temp oh I had to close out a template we do see people use those other fields a lot of times we often go in and see if we can get them to stop using them and get into some kind of custom I just want to point out too though because it didn't used to be that way but on like transaction summary reports or sales sales by item reports Etc you can go in and filter these reports by other like some not all of the other fields in there because there's three other fields but that you can filter the other fields on a report to reflect just whatever comes up from like other field two but the problem with that is again if I like I say PPC and I'm philosopher PPC but you know Johnny always puts in Google because that's what they say when the customer calls us that they found us on Google um and somebody else always puts in you know Bing then there's just not going to be consistency and if there's not consistency I really can't filter right if there's not consistency so those fields never used to be available as filters or as display they didn't used to be available but they have been for a couple years now um but if there's not consistency they're not really helpful hopefully that makes sense let me get off my I know how many times can I say that um all right so let's go back into editing our template additional customization so that field that I just added lead Source you can see now it's available here to add to my header right because it's from the customer list so any list data is in the header right sales reps are tied to customers terms are tied to customers within the header it doesn't mean that I can't um change it on the Fly Right like it'll default to PPC but I might change it and it says oh I was a referral source this time um okay so that's the other fields versus custom Fields the other thing that I wanted to talk about just real quick is customer messages so we do have this concept of customer messages inside of QuickBooks it's under our vendor and customer vendor profile lists right we have the customer message list and where we see this to a lot of times is on an invoice when you're looking at invoice and you come down here and you say like Sally was awesome today or whatever it is right because people see this customer message box and they say hey let me put a message in for Sally and then they add it um and then do a quick ad and guess what now that's on this list forever that was awesome today so these customer messages like the intent of it and what versus what how people end up using it um is not really great right so um because it goes on a list and it's on this list for all time just another item on the list right bogging down the DM system so if it's an individual message that we just need to see today I do recommend putting in the description the other thing though is that if you actually do want consistent messages the best way to get to that point is to edit the template go into the layout designer and add a text box right or an image if you want to create an image that's really pretty you can create an image of words so you can add a text box uh thank you for being an awesome customer referrals welcome right um You can add that text box and put it on the template I'm dragging the different box hold on you can do Ctrl Z here um nope let's see if I can there we go text box you can grab that text box and you can put it on your template so down below here I can make this template smaller I can move these boxes up right my total box gets moved up actual total gets moved up and then I have this whole Space down here for my text box and it didn't maintain what I said but thanks for being an amazing okay so this way it's on the template and always going to be there and somebody does not need to choose it from that massive customer list customer message list every single time this is a better practice more consistency okay oh my gosh I can't believe we're already out of time I think oh gosh how am I going to make a Whole 30 minutes out of talking about forms but there's so much stuff in here that you can do and it is not common how easy it is to use the form customization inside of QuickBooks this is not common in other products in other Erp products QuickBooks has made it so simple um all right so somebody said in here I missed where you went to find the vendor customer messages so we go to lists so anything that's list right you expect to see multiples is always going to be somewhere under list here except for customers employees vendors like the biggest list I'm sorry those who go to customer center and then we go down to customer and vendor profile lists just kind of like here's the list that are important but not so important basically like go into a sub list and then we have our customer message list right there so if you guys go in and you open up your invoice and you see your customer messages list is massive you should come in here and make some inactive right so you can make it inactive show inactives and just click click click click get them all and activated okay and go in and add the text box instead uh somebody else said I'd love to see an example of setting up a bill payment template um okay so if you go into templates down here uh like where is it um if you go into templates and you edit the bill payment template it's going to be a lot different notice that it doesn't have the template layout or additional customization in here I think it was two years ago that they changed this so in my what's new webinar from two years so not the one I just did last month but the one from the year before they made the modification here and it basically is showing um the date the check number the payment amount right so there were there was just a couple fields that it didn't show but maybe the original balance and balance that they didn't show before I think they didn't show check number as an example they didn't show bill payment date and so they added those fields um so you can insert a logo in here um but there's no layout designer yeah if I were to take this sales order and duplicate it and make it a bill payment and then edit this template you see like it's says logo but it's still not there still not there so it's not really that much money education okay uh I would have liked to get through some more editing sales orders invoices Etc I tell you the number one things that we edit on sales orders and purchase orders generally is a status that's the number one thing that we usually add so on the sales order and a purchase order as an example we'll do status either at the header level or the line level sometimes at the line level and it will say something like in production um in QC uh out for painting in the purchase order one we'll say you know uh vendor vendor acknowledgment received items shipped like things like that so we'll have different statuses that's usually the number one customization and we do all those things through a custom field not through other so if there's the consistency we have done overlays for people as well and mostly it's in the sales order mostly it's in the sales order um so it'll show which lines um have shipped on a report we'll put it on there because the back order Fields don't show up all the time the status of them don't show up all the time of where they're at so we have added an overlay for people before to like grid edit Mass grid edit sales orders too okay um okay and then Windsor was asking where can we go find these videos um so we do have a YouTube channel um so if you go to the four-lane YouTube channel we have hundreds of videos in there also the entirety of the what's new webinar training um if you guys missed that is up there we are going to be going into more specifics in the next couple weeks so higher or more in-depth training than what's in that what's new webinar but if you just go to YouTube and search for Lane there's a QuickBooks Enterprise series playlist you can see them there uh and then somebody said does Qbo have customizable forms so Qbo has a little more of foreign depending on the level of Qbo that you have but it's nowhere close to what desktop has so you can change something but it's very few so it's one of the things that I know that they're working on because it's so hard for Qbo to catch up to desktop because desktop has been around for so many years and is just always constantly coming out with great things so all right I'm two minutes over if you guys have any other questions definitely reach out to us um we will be on next week for um our intercompany transaction and we're going to be talking about web agility mileage mileage tracking using the app expiration dates and if you have anything else that you want to learn definitely reach out to us and let us know happy Wednesday hope you guys have a great rest of your week thank you [Music]