Welcome to the FitSmallBusiness QuickBooks Online training course. In this lesson, we’re going to cover how to customize the look and feel of your invoices, sales receipts and estimates.
You can follow along on your own QuickBooks Online account. If you don’t have one already, click here to sign up for a free 30-day trial and follow along below.
To complete this lesson, you can watch the video below, read through the step-by-step instructions or do both. Let’s begin.
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The Importance of Customizing Sales Forms
It’s important to customize sales forms because they are a reflection of your business. The default QuickBooks forms are not very professional looking and may not contain enough space for your business and customer information.
Because sales forms are sent to your customers, you want them to be professional looking and include the level of detailed information that your customers expect when providing them with an invoice for a sale or an estimate for work that you plan to do for them in the future.
Working with the Sales Tab in QuickBooks
Customizing the look and feel of your invoices are found within the Sales Tab in QuickBooks, which you can access by clicking on the Gear icon and selecting Account and Settings right below the Your Company column as indicated below.
Navigate to Account and Settings from the QuickBooks Online home page.
Within the Sales Tab, there are eight key areas to set up:
- Customize the look and feel: Allows you to select style and font of sales form templates
- Sales form content: Select customer payment terms, delivery method and turn on/off other fields like shipping, transaction numbers, discounts and deposits
- Products and services: Turn inventory on/off and activate price rules for customers
- Progress invoicing: This feature allows you to bill customers in installments
- Reminders: Auto reminders once customer invoices are coming due or past due
- Online delivery: Select if the customer prefers to receive invoices via email
- Statements: Turn this feature on if you prefer to bill customers with using statements
This lesson is about the first step, customizing the look and feel of your sales forms.
Complete the fields in the invoice customization section of QuickBooks Online.
How to Customize Sales Forms
Below are the step-by-step instructions on how to customize the look and feel of invoices, sales receipts and estimates:
Make sure that you are on the Sales tab. Click the blue Customize look and feel button as indicated below:
Navigate to the sales forms customization tab within QuickBooks Online.
Select the blue New Style button as indicated below:
Select a new sales form style In QuickBooks Online.
The next screen brings you to the Customize form style screen where the “magic” happens. There are five areas that QuickBooks allows you to customize for business sales forms:
- Style: Choose from five templates — Airy, Modern, Fresh, Friendly or Bold
- Appearance: Select font, add company logo and set margins
- Header: Determine what information appears at the top of the invoice like company address, phone number and payment terms
- Activity table: Select the columns that appear on invoices like quantity, description and price
- Footer: Determine what info you want to appear at the bottom of the invoices
Customize sales form style in QuickBooks Online.
Style
In this section, we have five templates to choose from:
- Airy: Default template
- Modern
- Fresh
- Friendly
- Bold
Each of the above templates differs in formatting and the number and type of fields that appear on the invoice. These templates are only design and have no impact on functionality, so the one you choose is completely just based on personal preference.
2. Appearance
Appearance tab within sales forms customization tab of QuickBooks Online.
In the appearance section, you can change the following information:
- The look and size of your logo
- Where your logo appears on the invoice — left, center or right
- You can set the font for your invoices
- You can set the line height on the body of the invoice — this is important if you have long product and service descriptions
- Page margins can be set if you are using custom letterhead that is not the standard 8.5 x 11 size paper
3. Header
Header tab within sales forms customization tab of QuickBooks Online.
In the Header section, you can change the following:
- Form names: The is the name of the form like Invoice, Estimate or Sales Receipt; for example, if you prefer to call an Estimate a Quote you can change the name of the form in QuickBooks to what you prefer
- Company: Here you can select what information like email, website and phone number that you want to appear on your invoices
- Customer: You can set payment terms and due dates that will show up on all invoices; you don’t want your customers to have to guess at when payment is due
- Custom: The custom fields section will only be applicable if you have created custom fields in QuickBooks. In the next lesson, we’ll discuss why you might want to create custom fields and how to do this in QuickBooks
4. Activity Table
Activity Table within sales forms customization tab of QuickBooks Online.
In the Activity Table section, you can select the columns that appear on your invoices and the order in which they appear. For example, since Paul bills by the hour, we changed the Quantity field to Hours.
5. Footer
Footer tab within sales forms Customization tab of QuickBooks Online.
In the Footer section, you can include a brief message to your customer’s on each invoice like “We appreciate your business!” There is also a place to enter information that you would like to appear at the very bottom of each invoice like your website.
As you make changes in each of these areas, you can click the Preview or Print button located at the bottom right part of the screen to see the changes. Once you are satisfied with the form, you can then save it.
Wrap Up
That wraps up the section on customizing the look and feel of your invoices, sales receipts and estimates. The next lesson in our QuickBooks Online Training Course will be How to Set Up Invoices, Sales Receipts and Estimates in QuickBooks Online. In this lesson, we will walk you through how to set payment terms for your customers and how to add discount and deposit information to your invoices.
To access this lesson or any of the others in the series, you can download all 39 video tutorials here.
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