Chapter 2
Entering Customers and Vendors
In this chapter:
• Entering customer information
• Working with customers in the Customer Center
• Using Custom fields
• Credit card security
• Entering vendor information
• Working with the Vendor Center
• Learning about 1099s in QuickBooks
Two groups help your company succeed: your customers who provide the income, and vendors, those folks from whom you purchase goods and services. With QuickBooks, it is easiest to enter the names of both groups before you start entering transactions. For both, you can store basic information such as addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, but you can also track and manage nearly everything and anything you need to know about your customers and your vendors in their respective centers. Let’s start with your customers.
Build Your Customer List
You can add your customers to QuickBooks in several ways. You can add them one-by-one, you can use the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window, or, if you’ve stored this information in an Excel sheet or a comma-separated (.csv) file, consider using a special QuickBooks utility designed to import this information. This import utility offers a step-by-step wizard you access by choosing File | Utilities | Import | Excel Files. Use the utility to import your vendors, inventory items, and your chart of accounts.
To create a new customer manually, click the Customers button on either the Icon Bar or the Home page to open the Customer Center. Next, click the New Customer & Job drop-down arrow at the top of the Customer Center window and select New Customer from the submenu. This action opens the New Customer window with the Address Info tab in the foreground, as shown in Figure 2-1. Fill in the appropriate information.
FIGURE 2-1 The New Customer window shows quite a lot of information.
Customer Information
Start with the Customer Name field at the top. The text you enter here doesn’t appear on printed transactions. You could consider this to be an internal code, because what you enter in the Company Name/Full Name fields appear as the customer name in printed sales transactions.
Create a customer name system so that you’ll enter every customer in the same way and avoid the risk of entering the same customer multiple times. For example, if your customer is a business, you can simply enter the name of the business; if your customer is an individual, it’s good practice to enter her last name first in the Customer Name field for sorting purposes.
In the Company Name, Full Name, and Address Details fields, enter the company name, a contact name if you choose, and the billing address. Add any other contact information you want to track. If you plan to e-mail statements or invoices to this customer, be sure to enter their e-mail address.
If your customer has multiple shipping addresses, choose a name for each Ship To address that you’ll choose from a drop-down list when you’re entering sales transactions. If the shipping address isn’t different from the billing address (or if you never ship products), you can ignore the Ship To field or click the Copy button to copy the data from the Bill To field.
To create a shipping address, click the plus sign button next to the Ship To address area to open the Add Shipping Address Information dialog. QuickBooks automatically enters the address name “Ship To 1.” Enter the address information and specify whether this address should be the default Ship To address, and then click OK. If needed, enter another Ship To address for this customer; it will have a default name of “Ship To 2”
Payment Settings
The Payment Settings tab puts all the important information about customer finances in one place, as shown in Table 2-1.
TABLE 2-1 Customer Payment Settings Options
Sales Tax Settings
If you collect sales tax, complete the fields on this tab. Select the appropriate sales tax code and item for this customer, or create a new sales tax item or code here if you need to. If the customer does not pay sales tax, select Non from the Tax Code drop-down list, and enter the customer’s resale certificate number in the Resale No. field. See Chapter 3 to learn more.
Additional Info
Use the Additional Info tab to enter more information about your customers, as shown in the following list. Here, you can use the available fields or create custom fields of your own to design reports based on the data captured in these fields.
• Customer Type Use this field to sort your customers by a type you choose, such as wholesale and retail customers. Click the arrow to select a type from the list or create a new type.
• Rep This field is the place to track a sales representative. Sales reps can be employees, vendors, or “other names” as entered in the Other Names List. Select a rep from the list of reps or add a new rep by choosing <Add New> from the dropdown list.
• Custom Fields Custom fields enable you to create fields for tracking special information about your customers (such as contract renewal date, for example). See how to use these fields in “Use Custom Fields” later in this chapter.
Job Info Tab
You can enter Jobs for this customer by selecting the Job Info tab at the left of the New Customer information window. Use the fields on this tab to help you keep track of the status of your work with this customer. See the “Use Jobs” section later in this chapter. When you have finished filling out the fields, click OK.
Adding Multiple Customer Records
Use the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window to add multiple customers at once (or to make changes to the information for existing customer records). From the Customer Center, from the New Customer & Job drop-down menu, choose Add Multiple Customer:Jobs.
The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window opens with the Customers list already selected. As shown in Figure 2-2, you can add new customers and jobs, change customer information, or fill in additional data. You can even copy and paste customers from an Excel sheet into the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window.
FIGURE 2-2 The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries screen can save you time when entering more than one item.
To get the most benefit from using the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window, notice the following important features and functions:
• List and view filters Select the List or View drop-down arrow to display only those records with which you want to work.
• Find field Use this field to quickly locate and work with a specific customer record.
• Customize Columns button Click to open the Customize Columns window, where you can add columns for the fields within the customer record that you want to modify.
• Copy down Right-click within any field, except the Name field, and select Copy Down to copy the contents of a selected field to all the remaining records in the list.
• Duplicate row With your cursor placed on any row in the table, right-click and from the resulting menu, select Duplicate Row to duplicate the selected record in the row below. The new duplicate record name will start with “DUP”.
The Customer Center
QuickBooks stores all of your customer detail information in the QuickBooks Customer Center. From here, you can create, edit, and get reports about customers and jobs. Click the Customers button on either the Icon Bar or the Home page to open the Customer Center.
Shown in Figure 2-3, the left pane of the Customer Center has two tabs: Customers & Jobs and Transactions. The list opens to a customer in the Customers & Jobs List and the right pane of the Customer Center displays information about that selected customer or job.
FIGURE 2-3 Use the Customer Center to perform many tasks.
All of your customer transactions are shown by transaction type in the Transactions tab. Selecting a transaction type displays the current transactions of that type in the right pane. You can manipulate and filter the display by choosing categories and sorting by column.
Customizing the Customers & Jobs List
You can customize the information shown in the Customers & Jobs List. By default, the list has three columns: Name, Balance Total, and Attach. (Learn about attached documents in Chapter 14). Customer balances display next to their names. If you have enabled the multiple currencies feature, the Currency column will also be visible.
To add more columns to the Customers & Jobs List, right-click anywhere in the list and choose Customize Columns to open the Customize Columns dialog. To add a column, select its label in the left pane and click Add. Alternatively, if you want to eliminate a column from your list, highlight its label in the right pane and click Remove.
Some users add an Overdue column so they know which customers have an overdue or almost due invoice. Learn more about this feature and the Collections Center in Chapter 5.
To rearrange the left-to-right order of the columns, select a column you want to move, and then choose Move Up to move a column to the left or Move Down to move it to the right. The order of columns displayed in the Chosen Columns pane of the dialog translates as top to bottom = left to right.
If you add columns to the Customers & Jobs List, you won’t be able to see all the information unless you widen the list’s pane as well as widen each column. To maximize this pane, click the Show Full List Only button, the right-pointing arrow located on the top right-hand corner of the Customers & Jobs List.
Working in the Customer Information Pane
The Customer Information pane is where QuickBooks keeps all of the customer information you’ve entered, as well as each sales-related transaction. You can quickly see the details behind a customer’s past due balance, add or update important notes or To Do’s that relate to a specific job, and even run key customer reports.
You will see two tabs at the left of your screen in the Customer Center. One is the Customers & Jobs list and the second is the Transaction list. At the right of these two tabs is the Customer Information pane. If you do not see this pane, the Customer list may be expanded. In this case, to display the Customer Information pane, click the left-pointing arrow at the far right of the list to display the Customer Information pane.
The top half of the Customer Information pane displays basic contact information, along with links to maps, directions, and key reports. The bottom half of the pane has five tabs that contain transaction details, contact information, To Do’s, notes, and sent e-mail information. When working in any of these tabs, click the Manage <tab name> button at the bottom of the window to add, edit, or delete the information contained therein.
• Transactions Use the Transactions tab to filter for information about a particular customer. Choose from several categories in the Show field drop-down lists. You can add and remove columns of information by right-clicking anywhere on or below the column headings and choosing Customize Columns.
• Contacts Use the Contacts tab to store all the ways that you can keep in touch with your customers. Click the drop-down arrows in the available fields and you’ll see that there’s a place for several types of phone and e-mail information and even for social media sites.
• To Do’s From the To Do’s tab, click the Manage To Do’s button and select Create New to compose a specific reminder for this customer. This can be very useful, because you get to specify the date on which you want to be reminded (the Due field) and categorize your new To Do as a call or meeting in the Type field, for example. You can then view your To Do note in the calendar (discussed in Chapter 1) or directly in the Customer Center. When the task is complete, open the reminder and change its status to Done. Click the Run Reports button on the To Do’s tab to see a detailed listing of all your To Do’s, including those for vendors and employees.
• Notes From the Notes tab, click the Manage Notes button to add, edit, or delete a note. The Date/Time Stamp button inserts the current date and time automatically when you add text to the notepad.
• Sent Email This is the best way to keep track of all the sales transactions you’ve e-mailed to a customer. In a single list, you can see the e-mail addressee, the date it was sent, and the form that was sent, including the reference number and amount.
Small Business Recommendation
Use Jobs
QuickBooks handles customers and jobs together so you have the option of creating a single customer and posting all the invoices to that customer, or creating multiple jobs for that customer and job-level invoices. Some businesses track only the customer, but if you’re a building contractor or subcontractor, or a service provider who sends invoices based on a project, you should track jobs. Jobs don’t stand alone; they are always attached to customers, and you can attach as many jobs to a single customer as you need.
When you track jobs, you can enter any current jobs during your QuickBooks setup phase or as you start them. Because jobs are attached to the customer, the customer has to exist in your QuickBooks Customers & Jobs List before you can create a job. Once the job is created, you can track its progress and keep an eye on the promised end date. If you think this will be the only job you perform for this customer, you can do the same thing for a customer without creating a job, because the customer record also has a Job Info tab. When you get another project from the customer, you can always add that new job.
Creating Jobs
To create a job, open the Customer Center and right-click the listing of the customer for whom you’re creating a job. Choose Add Job to open the New Job window. Create a name for the job (you can use up to 41 characters) and make it descriptive enough for both you and your customer to understand. Make any appropriate changes in the job’s Address Info tab. QuickBooks maintains this information only for this job and won’t change the original shipping address in the customer record. Update the Payment Settings and Additional Info tabs as required. The sales tax settings relate to the customer rather than the job, so you won’t see the Sales Tax Setting tab.
Fill in the details of this job in the Job Info tab. All of the information on the Job Info tab is optional. The Job Status drop-down list offers choices that you can change as the progress of the job moves along. You can change the default text to reflect the way you refer to each progress level, but the changes you make for the text are system-wide and affect every job. To change the text you use to track job status, follow these steps:
1. Choose Edit | Preferences to open the Preferences dialog.
2. Click the Jobs & Estimates icon in the left pane, and then open the Company Preferences tab in the right pane to see the current descriptive text for each status level.
3. Change the text of any status levels if you have a descriptive phrase you like better, such as “Working” instead of “In Progress.”
4. Click OK to save your changes, and this new text is used on every existing and new job in your system.
5. When you finish entering all the data about this job, click OK to close the New Job window and return to the Customers & Jobs List. The jobs you create for a customer become part of the customer listing.
Deleting and Hiding Customers & Jobs
From time to time, you may need to delete a customer or a job that you’ve created. Deleting a job is a bit more common than deleting customers, because sometimes QuickBooks users add a job when they prepare an estimate for a client for a new project and then delete the job if the project doesn’t materialize.
You can delete a customer (or a job) only if it has never been used in a transaction. Although many users complain that they can’t remove a customer that is essentially “dead wood” on their Customers & Jobs List, unfortunately, a zero balance doesn’t matter; the rule in QuickBooks is that you can delete a customer or a job only if it has never been used in a transaction. Moreover, you cannot delete a customer that has at least one job attached to it. Instead, you must first delete the jobs (if they can be deleted), and then delete the customer.
To delete a customer or job, select it on the Customers & Jobs List and press CTRL-D. QuickBooks asks you to confirm you want to delete this customer or job. Click OK to remove the customer or job.
If you have a customer that can’t be deleted but is no longer active, you can prevent users from selecting this customer in transaction windows by making the customer inactive (hiding the customer so it doesn’t appear in drop-down lists). To make a customer or job inactive, right-click its listing in the Customers & Jobs List and choose Make Customer:Job Inactive. If you make a customer with jobs inactive, all of the jobs are automatically made inactive. You cannot hide a customer without hiding all the jobs associated with that customer.
Active and Inactive Customers and Jobs
Your Customers & Jobs List is configured to show Active Customers (the default view), so inactive customers and jobs don’t appear on the list. To see which customers and jobs are inactive, select All Customers from the drop-down list at the top of the Customers & Jobs List, shown next. Inactive customers and jobs have an “X” to the left of their listings.
To make a customer or job active again, select All Customers as the view, and click the “X” next to the hidden customer or job to toggle the setting back to active. If you’re reactivating a customer with jobs, QuickBooks asks if you also want to make all the jobs active. If you click Yes, the customer and all jobs are activated. If you click No, the customer is activated and all the jobs remain inactive; you can activate any of the jobs individually.
Merging Customers or Jobs
Suppose you create a customer or job and enter at least one transaction before you realize it’s a duplicate of an existing customer or an existing job for the same customer. The best thing to do in this case is to merge the two customer entries or two job entries and move all the transaction history into one customer record. Follow these steps to do this:
1. Double-click the listing of the customer or job you do not want to keep to put it in Edit mode.
2. Change the customer or job name to match the name of the customer or job you want to keep.
3. Click OK. QuickBooks displays a message telling you that the name is in use and asks if you want to merge the names. Click Yes to complete the merge.
Merging customers works only when neither customer entry has any jobs associated with it, or when the customer name you want to delete has no jobs attached (it’s OK if the customer name you want to keep has jobs). Merging jobs works only when both jobs are linked to the same customer.
Use Custom Fields
You can add your own fields to the Customer, Vendor, Employee, and Item records. Custom fields are useful if you want to track particular information but QuickBooks doesn’t provide a field for it. For example, if you want to track customer birthdays or annual renewals for a contract, you can add fields to track that information. Custom fields for names are added to all names lists, but you can configure each field you create to limit its appearance to specific names lists. For example, you might create a custom field that you want to use in only the Customers & Jobs List or in both the Customers & Jobs and Vendors lists.
Adding a Custom Field
Do the following to add one or more custom fields to names:
1. Open a center (Customers & Jobs, Vendors, or Employees) and double-click any name on the list to put the record in Edit mode.
2. Move to the Additional Info tab.
3. Click the Define Fields button to open the Set Up Custom Fields For Names dialog, where you can name the field and indicate the list(s) in which you want to use the new field.
4. Click OK to save the information. QuickBooks displays a message indicating that you can add these fields to any customized templates. (See Chapter 16 for more information about templates.)
As with other fields, be sure you enter data in a consistent manner, or the information you retrieve might not be useful to you when you customize a report to include this custom information.
Secure Customer Credit Card Information
If you store customer credit card data, QuickBooks provides security features. These features are designed to help you meet the requirements set by the payment card industry that are known as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). When you log in to your company file as Admin, you may see a reminder about enabling credit card protection when you open the file. The first chore you face is changing your own Admin password so it matches the standards for complex passwords required by the credit card protection feature.
You should enable the credit card protection feature as soon as possible. You can perform the task by choosing Company | Customer Credit Card Protection and selecting Enable Protection, as long as you are logged in as the user named Admin.
The Challenge Question section is mandatory. If you forget your password, you can click the Reset Password button on the Login dialog. When you answer the challenge question correctly, QuickBooks lets you change your password to a new complex password. When you complete the dialog and click OK, QuickBooks confirms the fact that you’ve changed your password and informs you that you’ll have to repeat this task every 90 days.
Although you can disable the customer credit card protection feature, it is not recommended that you do so if you store any customer credit card information. To disable this feature, reopen the Customer Credit Card Protection window, select Disable Protection, and answer Yes to the dialog asking if you want to disable it.
QuickBooks Customer Credit Card Protection
Here are some important points to keep in mind when you enable Credit Card Protection:
• All users who have permission to view full credit card detail in the customer record must set up a complex password.
• The password must be changed every 90 days. Users who don’t change their passwords cannot open the file. If, as the Admin user, you fail to change your password, the credit card protection feature is disabled (and you see messages about your failure to comply with the rules set for businesses that accept credit cards).
• You cannot reuse any of your last four passwords.
• If a user enters an incorrect password three times (users sometimes guess different passwords when they can’t remember their passwords), the company file closes for that user.
• Only the Admin user can configure the functions in this feature.
• The QuickBooks credit card security audit log tracks all actions that involve credit cards (including viewing customer credit card information).
Small Business Recommendation
User Permissions for Viewing Credit Card Information
With credit card protection enabled, when you set up users and give them Full Access to the Sales and Accounts Receivable area, those users are not given permission to view customer credit card information unless you specifically select that option. Users who do not have permission to view credit card information see only the last four numbers of the customer’s credit card when they open the Payment Info tab of a customer’s record. Users who have permission to view customer information are forced to create a complex password during their next login.
When you set up new users and give them permission to access customer information, it’s not necessary to set up a complex password for them. Provide an easy-to-enter password, and QuickBooks will force a password change when they first log in.
Viewing the Security Log
When credit card protection is enabled, QuickBooks maintains a security log called the Customer Credit Card Audit Trail. This is a special report that can be viewed only by the QuickBooks Admin user. To open the report, choose Reports | Accountant & Taxes Customer Credit Card Audit Trail. This report is updated each time a customer’s credit card information is entered, displayed, edited, or deleted. The most recent activity always shows at the top of the report.
Create Your Vendors List
You have the same options when building your list of vendors in QuickBooks that you have when creating your Customers list. To create a vendor, open the Vendor Center from the Vendors menu or the Home page. Click the New Vendor icon above the Vendors list and select New Vendor. As you saw when entering your customers, the New Vendor dialog opens to the Address Info tab.
Vendor Information
Start by filling in the Vendor Name field at the top of the window, and fill in as much information as you think you’ll need, including contacts, telephone numbers, and so on. The Billed From address block is important if you plan to print and mail checks, as this is the mailing address. If you use window envelopes, when you insert the check in the envelope, the vendor name and address block is located to show through the window. Use the Shipped From address if your vendor ships from a place different from their billing location.
As with the Customer Center, don’t enter anything in the Opening Balance field. Instead, separately enter the existing open vendor bills that represent the current open (unpaid) balances. See Chapter 6 to learn how to enter vendor history.
Payment Settings
Use the Payment Settings tab to store useful information:
• Account No. If you have an account number with this vendor, enter it here. The number appears in the memo field of printed checks.
• Payment Terms The terms you enter here applies to all bills entered for this vendor.
• Credit Limit QuickBooks warns you if you enter a bill that when added to your existing balance exceeds your credit limit with this vendor.
• Billing Rate Level (Available only in the Premier and Enterprise versions.) If you plan on billing your customers for the work performed by this vendor, you can enter either a standard hourly or custom rate here. Each time you create an invoice with billable time, QuickBooks fills in the correct rate for each service item based on the vendor that did the work.
• Print Name On Check As Fill in this field if the Payee name is different from the Vendor name you entered. For example, the Vendor name for Greater State Electric may be “GSE.”
Tax Settings
If you send this vendor a Form 1099 at the end of the year, enter the tax ID number for this vendor and select the Vendor Eligible For 1099 check box. You’ll learn more about the 1099 tracking feature later in this chapter and in Chapter 17.
Account Settings
When you select accounts in this window for this vendor, they’ll appear automatically when you enter a bill or a check for the vendor. You can always change the pre-filled account before saving the bill or check, if necessary. You can pre-fill up to three accounts for a vendor, as shown next. This feature can be very useful for making loan payments, which require postings to principal and interest.
Additional Info
Use the Additional Info tab to record other details about your vendor for enhanced tracking and reporting:
• Vendor Type Select a vendor type or create one. This field is handy if you want to sort vendors by type, which makes reports more efficient.
• Custom Fields You can create custom fields for vendors as for customers.
Adding and Editing Multiple Vendor Records
If you want to add information to many or all of your vendor records at once, or you want to find an easy way to enter new vendors in a more streamlined way, use the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window.
From the Vendor Center, select New Vendor | Add Multiple Vendors. (You can also access this window by selecting Lists | Add/Edit Multiple List Entries and selecting Vendors as the list type.) The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window opens, and you can add new vendors, update key information, or fill in data you perhaps didn’t have when you first created the vendor. You can even copy and paste vendor information from an Excel worksheet into the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window to create a new vendor record quickly.
Here are some of the important features and functions in the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries window:
• List and view filters Select the List or View drop-down arrow to display only those records in your list with which you want to work.
• Customize Columns button Use this button to open the Customize Columns window. Here, you can add the columns to the vendor record that you want to modify or add columns to match those in a spreadsheet that you want to copy and paste from into QuickBooks.
• Copy Down Right-click any field in the table, except the Name field, and select the Copy Down command to copy the contents of the selected field to all the remaining records in the list.
• Duplicate Row Right-click any row in the table and choose Duplicate Row from the context menu that appears to duplicate the selected record in the row below. The new duplicate record name will start with “DUP”
The Vendor Center
Your list of vendors is stored in the Vendor Center, along with information about each vendor’s transactions. To open the Vendor Center, choose Vendors | Vendor Center from the menu bar or click the Vendors icon on the Icon Bar. The Vendor Center displays your Vendors list, gives you quick access to key reports, and makes it easy to enter vendor transactions.
The left pane of the Vendor Center has two tabs: Vendors (your Vendors list) and Transactions. A vendor is always selected in the list (by default, the first vendor in the list when you first open the Vendor Center), and the right pane of the Vendor Center displays both the details and transactions for the selected vendor.
Customizing the Vendors List
You can customize the information displayed in the Vendors list as well as the Vendor Information pane on the right side of the window. By default, the Vendors list has three columns: Name, Balance Total, and Attach. The Attach column displays a paper clip icon next to the vendor name if you’ve attached a scanned or other document to that record using the Doc Center. Use the scroll bar to find the vendor you want to see.
Use the drop-down list at the top of the Vendors tab to display your vendors in any of following ways:
• All Vendors
• Active Vendors
• Vendors With Open Balances
• Custom Filter
Use the Custom Filter to display only vendors that match the criteria you set in the Custom Filter dialog. The options in the dialog are easy to understand and use.
Add more columns to the list by right-clicking anywhere in the list and choosing Customize Columns to open the Customize Columns dialog. To add a column, select its label in the left pane and click Add. The information the column describes displays foreachvendorinthelist. As long as the vend or you’re interested in is displayed on the portion of the list that’s visible, the information is available—you don’t have to select the listing or open the record.
You can rearrange the left-to-right order of the columns by opening the Customize Columns dialog and selecting a column you want to move. Choose Move Up to move a column to the left or Move Down to move it to the right. The order of columns displayed in the Chosen Columns pane of the dialog translates as top to bottom = left to right.
If you add columns to the Vendors list, you won’t be able to see all the information unless you widen the list’s pane and also adjust the width of each column. To maximize this pane, click the Show Full List Only button.
Working in the Vendor Information Pane
You can view all the information you’ve entered for each vendor as well as every purchasing-related transaction. The bottom half of the pane has five tabs that contain detailed information for this vendor. Use the Manage <tab name> button at the bottom of the window to create a new entry, edit, or delete the information on any tab.
• Transactions The Transactions tab lists all types of vendor transactions. Selecting a transaction type by using the drop-down arrow next to the Type field filters for the selected transactions for a particular vendor. You can also filter the information by changing one or all of the three available filters: Type, Status, and Date. Add, remove, or change columns by right-clicking anywhere on or below the column headings and choosing Customize Columns.
• Contacts Use this tab to add more detail about who to contact.
• To Do’s Click the Manage To Do’s button and select Create New to compose a reminder for a specific vendor in the Add To Do dialog. View your To Do note in the calendar or directly in the Vendor Center, or click the Run Reports button to see a detailed listing of all your To Do’s.
• Notes Click the Manage Notes button to add, edit, or delete a note in the Notepad dialog. Click the Date/Time Stamp button to insert the current date automatically when you’re adding text to the notepad.
• Sent Email Use the Sent Email tab to view and keep track of the purchase orders that you’ve e-mailed a vendor.
Edit Vendor Information
Edit a vendor’s information by double-clicking the vendor’s listing in the Vendors list to open the vendor’s record in Edit mode. Fill in any additional data details you need. You can change any data you’ve previously entered. Be careful about changes in the Vendor Name field, however, since any changes will change the way the name appears in your Vendors list and vendor reports. Changing the Vendor Name field can also change the name associated with past transactions that you have cleared in QuickBooks. For example, if your phone company changes from AT&T to Verizon, and you change the vendor name, all past checks and bill payments written to AT&T will show as written to Verizon.
To open a menu of actions you can take in the Vendor list, right-click anywhere within the list to open the menu shown here:
Delete or Inactivate a Vendor
You can remove a vendor from the list only if that vendor has never been involved in a transaction. To delete a vendor, select its listing in the Vendors tab of the Vendor Center and press CTRL-D. QuickBooks asks you to confirm that you want to delete the vendor; just click OK to finish the task. If the vendor has ever been involved in a transaction, QuickBooks issues an error message saying you can’t delete this vendor.
If you can’t delete a vendor but you don’t want this vendor used in transactions, you can hide the vendor’s listing by making it inactive. To make a vendor inactive, right-click its listing in the Vendors list and choose Make Vendor Inactive.
If your Vendors list is configured to show Active Vendors (the default view), inactive vendors don’t appear on the list. To see which vendors are inactive, click the small down arrow to the right of the View field at the top of the list and select All Vendors from the drop-down list. Inactive vendors have an “X” to the left of their listings. To make a vendor active again, select All Vendors as the view and click the “X” next to the hidden vendor or job to toggle the setting back to active. Inactive vendors are included in reports, so you can continue to get accurate reports on purchases and other vendor activity.
Merge Vendors
If you have inadvertently created a duplicate vendor and entered a transaction, you can merge the two vendors and move all the transaction history into one vendor record. Follow these steps:
1. Double-click the listing of the vendor you do not want to keep, which opens its record in Edit mode.
2. Change the data in the Vendor Name field to match exactly the name of the vendor you want to keep.
3. Click OK. QuickBooks displays a message telling you that the name is in use and asks if you want to merge the names. Click Yes.
Remember that the trick to merging is to start with the vendor name you don’t want and merge into the vendor name you do want.
Use Custom Fields in Vendor Records
As with the Customers list, QuickBooks has the ability to create custom fields for the Vendors list. Although custom fields for Names lists are added to all Names lists, you can configure each custom field you create to limit its appearance to specific Names lists. For example, you might create a custom field that you want to use in only the Vendors list, or in both the Customers & Jobs and Vendors lists.
Adding a Custom Field for Vendors
To add one or more custom fields to the vendor list, follow these steps:
1. Open the Vendor Center, select any name on the Vendors list, and then press CTRL-E to put the record in Edit mode.
2. Move to the Additional Info tab.
3. Click the Define Fields button to open the Set Up Custom Fields For Names dialog, where you can create a field name and choose the list(s) that will use this new field.
4. Click OK to save the information. You’ll see a message reminding you that you can add this new field to any customized templates.
5. The Additional Info tab for every name in the list(s) you selected shows the field, and you can add data to any name for which the field has relevance. Enter data in a consistent manner so you get accurate information when you customize reports that include this information.
Create 1099 Vendors
QuickBooks supports only the 1099-MISC form. If any vendors are eligible for 1099 reporting, enter that information when setting them up. See Chapter 17 for the process of verifying and filing 1099 forms in QuickBooks.
Ensure that your QuickBooks file is set up to track and process 1099 forms. Choose Edit | Preferences, click the Tax: 1099 icon, and move to the Company Preferences tab to see your settings. Click Yes next to the question, Do You File 1099-MISC Forms? You are required to issue Form 1099-MISC at the end of the calendar year for a vendor to whom you’ve paid $600 or more for services and whose business operates as an individual or partnership.
To issue form 1099, you must have the vendor’s federal Tax Identification Number (TIN), which can be a social security number or an employer identification number (EIN). Open each appropriate vendor listing and open the Sales Tax Settings tab. Select the option labeled Vendor Eligible For 1099, and fill in the Vendor Tax ID number