Comments on: Helpful QuickBooks Tips

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:14:57 +0000

Charlie,

I was hoping I would find an article on creating and modifying QuickBooks custom summary and detail transaction reports among your blogs. The information in Help is very spread out under many topics. Currently I am trying to figure out how to add a subtotal to an existing report that I modified. Help claims you can do it but does not tell you how. Maybe the information is there but I could not find it.

Examples of transactions reports I would like to create are:

(1) payment history for a particular customer
(2) sales history for a particular customer
(3) sales history for a particular inventory item

Maybe this is too big a topic to cover, but I would appreciate your thoughts or direction.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:25:11 +0000

Noreen, this really isn’t a great place to ask general questions. We aren’t really set up for that. You are better off going to the Intuit Community Forum at http://community.intuit.com/quickbooks and asking your questions there. You will find many people who can help, and the format is set up better for an interactive dialog between people. You can use QuickBooks for your kind of business – I don’t know that I’d worry about using “jobs” or not unless you have multiple residences for one customer. I’m not sure what you mean by “dummy invoices”.

By: Noreen

Noreen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:55:53 +0000

I apologize if I’m posting this in the wrong forum, however I didn’t see a related topic. Your website has been a great resource for a new Quickbooks user, however I have to get over a very important hurdle and that is – will Quickbooks work for my business? We run a residential gutter cleaning business and need to track each time we do a cleaning for a customer (date, price, etc.). We have approx 1500 customers and each customer can have 1-4 cleanings per year. Should I use the job feature? Or use dummy invoices. We are using Quickbooks to create estimates, manage customer data and (hopefully) manage cleaning history. All invoicing and billing is done outside of Quickbooks by a separate party. We are currently using Quickbooks Pro 2007, but plan on upgrading to 2010 very soon. We also have the latest version of MS Outlook and MS Office which we may have to use if Quickbooks does not meet our needs. I also have a question about creating a mail merge form letter from a QB customer list report.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:25:17 +0000

He, Ed. I wrote another article on shortcuts at http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2009/07/quickbooks-keyboard-shortcuts/ and this one mentions the other options for dates. I’ll modify this posting to point to that article.

Thanks for the note on the transaction journal.

By: Ed Jaworski

Ed Jaworski — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:15:41 +0000

Addendum to dates tip: You can also use the “+” and “-” keys to go back or forward one day at a time from the date in the current field. You can also use “Y” for beginning of current Year or “R” for end of current yeaR; “M” or “H” for begin/end of current MontH.

Addendum to Transaction Journal: As I remember, in the Accountant’s Editions, the Debit and Credit field is displayed by default. In the other editions, this report only shows the net Balance so you may have to modify the report to see the Debit and Credit amounts.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:32:16 +0000

Glad you like it, Pat. I’m accumulating things as I go along, and when I get a slow week, I’ll write another article. Subscribe, and you’ll see!

By: PAT

PAT — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:49:13 +0000

Yes, these were great. Anymore coming soon?

By: Charlie

Charlie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:29:35 +0000

You are right, there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I have an article that lists many more, at http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2009/07/quickbooks-keyboard-shortcuts/

By: Dick

Dick — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:16:42 +0000

There are other shortcuts that can be used in the date field. “Y” takes you to the first day of the year, and “R” takes you to the last. Since these are the first and last letters of the words themselves, I find them very easy to remember (unlike the sometimes tortured “mnemonics” found in other programs). The same idea applies if you use the words MontH and WeeK.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:42:09 +0000

You have saved me so much time and frustration. I have pulled most of my hair out over the issue of digging deeper to find out which accounts have been used on a transaction (debits and credits). I think you are going to help me keep what little hair I have left! Many thanks.