Setting Sales and Customers Preferences

You can customize some of the standard features that apply to invoices by making adjustments in the Sales And Customers preferences screen. The types of preferences that relate to your sales operations include setting a default shipping method, setting a standard markup percent for items you purchase and resell to customers, and indicating a standard FOB for your company. In addition, you indicate how you want reimbursements to be recorded in your financial records, in what order customer payments are to be applied to outstanding invoices, whether you want to be told you are about to issue a duplicate invoice number, and whether you want to use the QuickBooks Price Level feature. The QuickBooks Price Level feature enables you to easily apply discounts or price increases to items on your invoices. The settings you make here affect all of your company's invoices. Note that only a user with administrative rights can make changes to sales and customers' preferences.

Select Preferences from the Edit menu.

Click the Sales & Customers icon.

Click the Company Preferences tab.

Indicate the most common shipping method that your company uses in the Usual Shipping field.

Indicate the status that applies to your sales in the Usual FOB field.

Did You Know?

FOB stands for Free on Board. FOB refers to the physical place where the ownership of an item changes hands from the vendor to the purchaser. This designation is used when discussing shipping costs and is important for determining who has the responsibility of shipping and insurance costs. "FOB Our Warehouse" for example, means the ownership of the item transfers to the purchaser when it leaves the seller's warehouse. The purchaser is responsible for shipping charges and insurance on the item from the time it leaves the seller's premises.

Check the Warn About Duplicate Invoice Numbers checkbox if you want to receive a warning when you are about to issue an invoice with a number that duplicates another invoice.

Check Track Reimbursed Expenses As Income if you have expenditures that will be recorded as income rather than an offset to the expense account.

Enter a Default Markup Percentage that is to be used for standard markups on items your company buys and resells to customers.

Check Use Price Levels to use the QuickBooks Price Levels feature for quickly adjusting amounts on sales forms by a preset percentage.

Check Automatically Apply Payments if you want QuickBooks to apply customer payments to outstanding invoices.

Check Automatically Calculate Payments if you want to automatically calculate the amount of payments you received based on the invoices you check off on the Receive Payments list.

Check Use Undeposited Funds As a Default Deposit to Account to designate your Undeposited Funds account as the default account when recording payments that you receive.

Click OK.

Did You Know?

You can change preference settings on invoice forms. The settings you make in the Sales & Customers Preferences dialog box affect all of your company's invoices. However, you can override these settings, if necessary, on the actual invoices.