Welcome to the Fit Small Business 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 either watch the video below, read through the step-by-step instructions, or do both. Let’s begin!

Before we get started with the lesson, it’s worth mentioning that there are affordable virtual bookkeepers that can set-up and manage your QuickBooks for you. They will even help you get caught up if you are behind. For example, SmartBooks offers help with cash flow management, monthly financial statements, payroll processing and more starting at $250/month. Get a free consultation to learn more.

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Why is it Important to Customize the Look and Feel of Invoices, Sales Receipts, and Estimates?

The default QuickBooks forms are not very professional looking and may not contain enough space for your business/ customer information. It’s important to customize sales forms because they are a reflection of your business.  Since 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 is 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 Company Information, as indicated below.

Within the Sales Tab, there are six key areas to set up:

• Customize look and feel
• Sales form content
• Products and Services
• Messages
• Online delivery
• Statements

This lesson is about the first step, customizing the look and feel of your sales forms.

How Do I Customize the Look and Feel of Invoices, Sales Receipts, and Estimates?

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:

Select the blue New Style button as indicated below:

The next screen brings you to the Customize form style screen where the “magic” happens:

There are 5 areas that QuickBooks allows you to customize for business sales forms:

1. Style
2. Appearance
3. Header
4. Activity Table
5. Footer

Style 

In this section, we have 5 templates to choose from:  

1. Airy – this is the default template
2. Modern
3. Fresh
4. Friendly
5. Bold

Each template differs in formatting and the number/type of fields that appear on the invoice.

Appearance

In the appearance section, you can change the following info:

1. The look and size of your logo
2. Where your logo appears on the invoice (left, center or right)
3. You can set the font for your invoices
4. You can set the line height on the body of the invoice (this is important if you have long product/service descriptions)
5. Page margins can be set if you are using custom letterhead that is not the standard 8.5 by 11 size paper

Header

In the Header section, you can change the following:

1. The name of the form (Invoice, Estimate, 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.
2. Company Information allows you to select what information (email, website, phone number etc)  you want to appear on your invoices. 
3. Customer info  allows you to have payment terms and due date show up on all invoices. You don’t want your customers to have to guess at when payment is due.
4. 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.  

Activity Table

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.

Footer

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, then you can 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, click here. 

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