Customize invoices and sales forms in QuickBooks Online

[0:00] Customizing your sales forms helps you put your best foot forward whenever you communicate with your customers. Let's go over how to update your sales forms so that they match your company's brand and how to choose what your customers see on the forms you send. First, select Settings. Select Custom form styles. Every company starts with a standard style for sales forms.

[0:23] This is your default template. You can select New style and start from scratch to create a style for one specific form, or just Edit the standard style to make changes to all your forms at once. Let's start in the Design tab. This is where you select the overall look of the template. Select a template to decide the basic layout. Every good sales form needs a logo.

[0:46] Just select Make logo edits, and then select the box to upload your company's logo. The colors on your forms change based on the colors of your logo, but you can change that. You can also change your font and layout settings like the margins, or if you want, you can print your forms onto letterhead.

[1:06] You can also lay out forms so that when they're printed, they fit into a window faced envelope, but this isn't available if you select the Fresh or Bold template. Select Content to update the info you want to include on your forms. Forms have three sections: the Header, Table, and Footer. In the Header, you can select the contact information you want to include when you send forms to customers.

[1:32] The form name appears towards the top, but you can turn this option off. You can also change the name of each form. Most businesses include a transaction number, but you can turn it off. You can also update the transaction numbers manually. Finally, you can select whether to show Shipping info, Terms, and even custom fields. These options depend on your company's sales settings.

[1:58] Information on what you're charging your customer for is seen in the Table section. An Account summary is optional, but it's handy if you send invoices to customers who already have balances. With this option turned on, your customer sees what they owed before the invoice as a Balance Forward, the New Charges, and then a total.

[2:20] Go to the Activity table to customize the details of the products and services you're charging a customer for. This is where you can edit the service date, name of the product or service, Description, Quantity, Rate, Amount, and SKU fields. Your customer will see anything that's selected so you can select what's to be shown and what's not.

[2:39] You can also reposition the fields by dragging them like this. Select Edit Labels and Widths to change the column labels and widths. Enter the new label in its field and use the bar to widen or shrink a column. Column sizes are limited, so you may need to shrink one before you can widen another. There are a few more options available.

[3:01] You can decide how the invoice groups time, whether or not you want to show how much of an estimate has been invoiced through progress invoicing, and how you want markups for billable expenses to appear. These additional features appear if you select them in your settings. The last section is the Footer.

[3:21] This is where you can include information about discounts you've given a customer and the deposits you've received from them. Also, if you're creating an invoice based on an estimate, you can opt to include a summary. You can also personalize your messages to customers on sales forms. Enter a separate message that appears on the forms. Select Done to save the changes made to any of the sections.

[3:46] Now you're ready to customize all the forms you send to customers.