Customer Odds and Ends

In this chapter, I discuss most of the important commands on the Customers menu. However, the Customers menu supplies several other commands that are noteworthy — perhaps even useful — and deserve discussion somewhere in this book. For this reason, I want to briefly describe the other commands available on the Customers menu:

• Customer Center: Displays the Customer Center window, which includes information about your customer list, including the amounts that your customers owe.

• Enter Statement Charges: Displays the Accounts Receivable Register. You shouldn't need to use this command. You can, however, use this command to add amounts to the accounts receivable for a particular customer. The amounts then appear on the customer's next statement.

• Create Statements: Displays a window that you can use to create a set of monthly statements for customers. Such statements show the amounts that a customer owes, invoices created for the month, credit memos issued for the month, and payments made during the month.

• Add Credit Card Processing: Displays a submenu of commands that you can use to deal with credit card payments and credit card billing. QuickBooks, by the way, supports credit card merchant accounts and makes it easy to accept credit cards from customers. This is something you may want to do. You should visit the QuickBooks Web site and find out the details.

• Marketing and Customer Tools: Displays a Web page of marketing tools that Intuit (the maker of QuickBooks) supplies to small businesses, including a tool to submit your small business's Web site to online directories, such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Local.

• Item List: Displays the Item List, which shows the items that may be included on the invoice or credit memo.

• Change Item Prices: Lets you change the prices of a bunch of different items at one time — for example, increasing every price by 5 percent.