Video: Overview of the Customer Center

In this video, I show you how to add customers and jobs using the Customer Center. In QuickBooks, a customer is anyone who pays you for goods or services. A job is a specific project or scope of work that you want to track. We’re going to dig into these a little deeper as we go on. For more information on how using customers and jobs can help you run your business, check out these other videos:

Video Script

Hi, I’m Shelly King with the QuickBooks for Mac team, and I’m going to give you a tour of key area of QuickBooks, the Customer Center.

This may seem obvious, but I just want to define a couple of terms first. In QuickBooks, a customer is anyone who pays you for goods or services. A job is a specific project or scope of work that you want to track. We’re going to dig into these a little deeper as we go on.

The Customer Center is where you can find all the information about your customers and the work you do for them. As you can see, I don’t have any customers in my list yet, so let’s get started by adding a customer.

To add a customer, I’m going to click the + button at the bottom of the center and choose New Customer.

Now on the address info pane, I’m going to fill in the contact information for my customer. Enter my customer’s name as I want it to see it in your lists. Then I enter the other contact information. For the Bill To address, I can use Address Details to be sure I enter all the information QuickBooks needs. And since this customer’s shipping address is the same as her billing address, I’m just going to click Copy to copy that address over.

Soon, I’ve got a full customer list. On a side note, if you use Address Book to keep your contact information, QuickBooks can sync with it so you don’t have to type in all your customers’ information. I’ll explain that in another video.

So now that I have customers, I’ve got a new potential job from one of them, Kristy Aberkrombie. Creating a  job makes it easy to track income and expenses for a particular project. So I select Kristy in my customer list and then choose Add Job.

QuickBooks goes ahead and preloads the customer information for Kristy. At the top of the window, I enter the Job’s name. The rest of the window contains Kristy’s information.

Then I’m going to the Job Info pane to enter information about the job. Right now I’m just bidding on the job, so I select Pending as the status.

But as I move forward with the project, I’ll add information to help me track the progress of the job.

All during the job, I can select the job in the Customer Center and see the transactions for that job.

Since I’ve been tracking my work for Kristy as a job, I can use reports such as the Job Profitability Summary to get better insight into each project.

Thanks for watching this overview of the Customer Center. For more articles and videos about using QuickBooks for Mac, go to quickbooks.com/littlesquare.


About Shelly King

Shelly King works for Intuit as a member of the QuickBooks for Mac team. She’s the Managing Editor for Little Square and its main contributor. Shelly grew up in the South until 1994 when the Internet called her to Silicon Valley. She’s done a lot on the web ever since. Little Square was her idea. Yep, it’s all her fault. See all of Shelly's articles

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