Customizing Invoices

QuickBooks lets you customize an invoice form to suit the needs of your business, but there may be times when you want to design a completely different invoice form. QuickBooks lets you do that, too. You can use the Layout Designer to create a new form design for your business. In the Layout Designer, you can move, resize, or change the width of columns, turn on or off borders around fields, and control font type and size for each field.

Creating New Templates

To create a new invoice template:

1. From the Lists menu, choose Templates. QuickBooks displays the Templates list.
2. Click the Templates menu button, and then choose New. QuickBooks displays the Select Template Type window.
3. Click OK to select the invoice form. QuickBooks displays the Customize Invoice window, which uses multiple tabs to display several sets of formatting options. Each area of the form is represented by a tab. To display the available formatting options, click the tab for the area of the form you want to change.
4. In the Template Name field, type the name of your Template. Notice that the Header tab is currently selected. The Header tab displays the formatting options you have for the top part of the invoice form. For each field, you can specify the title you want and whether you want the field displayed onscreen, on paper, both, or neither. You can enter a new title by highlighting the current title text and typing your new one.
   If you want to track information about a particular invoice, but don't want your customer to see this information, select the Screen checkbox and clear the Print checkbox.
5. Click the Fields tab. The Fields tab is where you select which fields you want to appear on screen and on paper. You can specify your own title (label) for each field.
   Suppose you want to remind customers of payment due dates at the time you send the invoice. You can customize the invoice form to display the Due Date field.
6. To have the Due Date field display both on screen and on the printed form, click the Screen and Print columns for Due Date to select both checkboxes.
   Checkmarks appear in both checkboxes.
7. Clear the Screen and Print checkboxes for the P.O. field to remove the field from the form.

To display the custom form:

From the Customers menu, choose Create Invoices.
QuickBooks displays the Create Invoices window with the Custom Invoice template displayed.
In the Form Template field, choose the name of your Template from the drop-down list.