How To Customize an Invoice in QuickBooks
Your clients aren’t just dry businesses or households that operate perfectly within predefined logistical principles. They’re composed of real people who make decisions and pass judgement on your business from an external perspective.
Consumers are getting more and more involved in the buying process. They’re doing more research, more digging into your business, more reading into reviews, and more analysis on how you treat people. It’s important to make sure that everything your company puts out is your very best – with global competition at an all-time high, you can’t afford anything else.
One of the biggest things that modern companies need to consistently optimize is communication. Gone are the days of minimal contact with a “just get it done” attitude. Customers want high-quality service at every level.
For example, according to Forbes, 92% of consumers would stop buying from a company after three or fewer bad customer service experiences.
The delivery of any and all communication from your business should be optimized: advertisements, the checkout process, internal memos, the lot. Making these things more effective or interesting is a great way to really push your brand the extra mile.
One document that needs particular attention is your company’s invoice. An invoice is essentially a message to your client that it’s time to pay up – something that people and businesses typically dread. Receiving this message needs to be as pleasant and as impactful as possible, so that your client remembers the good things about your product or service, rather than things that need improvement.
Customizing your company’s invoice is made very easy by QuickBooks – you can do it right from your account. The process varies a bit from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop, so we’ll cover both. Let’s walk through the steps of customizing an invoice to make sure it gives the best impression possible to your clients.
How to Customize an Invoice in QuickBooks Online
Customizing an invoice in QuickBooks Online is as easy as it gets. From your main page, simply click the gear icon (Settings) and select “Form Styles”. Click “New Style” and select which form template you want to customize.
You’ll see a number of tabs that allow you to customize your invoice. The first is labeled “Design” and allows you to change the aesthetics of your invoice. The second tab is labeled “Content”, which walks you through changing the content on your form. The third tab is labeled “Emails”, and the final tab is labeled “Payments”.
Those last two tabs won’t customize the invoice itself. The “Emails” section allows you to enter a custom email message that will accompany your invoice. This can be a great way to lead your client more gracefully into the payment stage.
The “Payment” tab lets you adjust the settings for online payment of said invoice.
Within the “Design” tab, you will find a number of fairly self-explanatory buttons in the sidebar, which each allow you to change a different aspect of the invoice. We recommend you start with a template and go from there, changing the color scheme, fonts, and logos to match your brand. Feel free to play around with the different templates, but remember that in order to add SKUs or create progress invoices, you’ll need to use the Airy Classic template.
Once you get your invoice looking on-brand, it’s important to make sure that all of the content on the invoice is appropriate. In the “Content” tab, you can adjust almost anything about what’s displayed on the invoice. Add or remove data fields, sections, headers, boxes, descriptions, etc. until your invoice displays all of the necessary information but isn’t cluttered with superfluous boxes and numbers. It may be a good idea to add a disclaimer or user agreement information here as well, to clear up any possible confusion.
After you’ve adjusted everything to your liking, you’re ready to start sending that sparkly new invoice to clients!
How to Customize an Invoice in QuickBooks Desktop
To start, go to the “Lists” menu in your QuickBooks Desktop terminal. Then, select “Templates”. Double click the template you want to customize, and you’ll be taken to the customization window.
From there, customization is fairly easy. You can adjust the fonts and text colors for many different fields, including labels, company name, and data.
You can also adjust the contact information for your company, to ensure your client is able to reach out if they have any problems.
The “Additional Customization” button allows you to add and remove fields for display on either the digital copy or the printed copy, depending on your needs.
The “Layout Designer” button at the bottom of the window will bring you to, well, the layout designer. This is a great tool that allows you to reposition the fields, headers, and footers on your invoice to match your exact specifications.
Be sure to save your progress regularly. Before long, you’ll have a clean, effective invoice to send to clients.
And that’s it! Customizing invoices is sometimes ignored by businesses because it seems unnecessary. However, good business owners know that your clients notice the effort you put into the details, and they’re sure to prefer the new, interesting invoice over the old one. Having a clean, branded invoice is simply part of good bookkeeping.
Booktied is committed to giving your business all of the bookkeeping catch-up, training, and resources it needs. If you have any questions about customizing invoices or about what Booktied can do for you, contact us! Be sure to check out our related articles on our blog for more QuickBooks help, as well!