QuickBooks Desktop 2023 customized shortcuts and homepage icons. Let’s do it within two it’s QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership
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So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop sample Rockcastle construction practice file provided by QuickBooks going through the setup process, we do every time maximizing the home page to the gray area,
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go into the view drop down open windows list on the left hand side, we’re not going to open up any reports because we’re focused in on some customization areas, some shortcuts, some items that might make the data input a little bit easier or more customizable for your particular needs.
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And sometimes when we do some of that customization, it actually makes us close all the windows and open them back up again, which we don’t want to have to do.
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The three areas we will be taking a look at will be the homepage are there certain icons that we can add or remove making the homepage more useful. The next will be the the favorites.
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On the left hand side, we’re currently have the open windows open, which is what I use most of the time. And I usually toggle this little icon down so I can see the open windows.
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But you might want to use the shortcuts here. And so you can open up the shortcuts, we looked at some of the shortcuts in there, automatically, we’ll go into a little bit of them in more detail and think about how we can customize those shortcuts. also noting that you could in a view setting, if I go to the
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View drop down up top, instead of having those on the left hand side, you could put them on the top, which I think is going to be that would be useful if you actually use some of these shortcuts a lot,
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I don’t typically do that. I think most people don’t do that, because they like to use the open windows item. And so they put it on the left hand side, but some people might like that.
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So I’m gonna go to the View drop down and put that back on the left. And then the other area that you can customize for easier,
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faster data input is in the Favorites tab up top, you can have this drop down and customize the favorites for those types of things that you would like to get to more easily possibly those types of things that are buried in a particular drop down, for example,
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they’re down at the bottom or something like that, and you would like to put them into the favorites area, then you have that option. Let’s first think about the homepage,
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the homepage is a nice visual flowchart, great place to go, there might be some icons that you would like to include on the homepage, some that you might want to remove.
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Now most of the flows in the homepage, I’m going to close up, the caret on the left are there are populated due to the type of industry that has been set up. So for example, in the vendor section,
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if you turn inventory off, you’re not going to have this top line item because you don’t have the inventory tracking, you’ll just have the bills, and the pay bills that will happen automatically when you set up the company. And you tell the system that you don’t have any inventory, for example.
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But there might be some items in here that you might just not use. Perhaps you don’t ever use the Sales Receipt form, you only use the full service accrual form.
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And therefore you’d like to remove the Sales Receipt form. So it doesn’t confuse you or other users of QuickBooks on the staff or something like that, you might be able to do some further customization to the homepage for that purpose.
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So let’s first look at that we can go to the File drop down or the Edit drop down, and then go to the preferences at the bottom go into the preferences. We’ll talk about all of the preferences in more detail in a future presentation. But for here, we’re just looking at the desktop view to see the customizations there.
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You got the my preferences on the first tab, you could choose not to show the homepage. So when it opens up, you don’t show it I still like it, I still use the homepage.
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So every time I open up the company file, the homepage opens up and that’s what how I like to see it. I’m gonna go to the company tab, the second tab. And then we have some of these items.
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So select the features that you want to show on the homepage. So we have the Sales Receipt up here. So if we’re not using the sales receipt, we could remove that. This is the state statement and charges we could remove those if we don’t use those two items,
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so and they’re not gonna have an impact or tied to anything else, right? So we could say, I’m going to uncheck those. If you change something like that, it usually forces you to close all the windows. So be aware of that. So I’m going to say,
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OK, and then it says QuickBooks must close all the open windows, I’m gonna say, okay, and then open back up the homepage, and the company dropped down homepage. And then let’s see what happened. What did it do? What did it do?
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What did you do QuickBooks, so it removed that one. And again, it’s a little bit more streamlined, and you got little, little less stuff happening down here. And that might make the data input a little bit easier for users of the QuickBooks. So I’m going to put them back in,
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I’m going to go to Edit, Preferences, and we’re in the desktop view, let’s put those back, it’s going to make us close everything up again, I’m gonna say, okay, closes everything up,
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company dropped down homepage, and maximize to the gray area they have returned. Now the other items are tied to the preferences in terms of how we set up the company.
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So Edit, Preferences, if we go to the desktop, company preferences, you can see down here to show or hide item icons on the home page, you need to turn the feature on or off, click a feature name below to view its preferences.
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So in other words, whether or not it shows on the homepage is going to be tied to whether or not you’re going to use that item.
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So if you wanted to have not have estimates, then you would, you would have to turn off the estimates feature, which may be likely it might be a case, you might not use estimates, in which case you you could turn them off to remove the sales tax item,
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then you would have to turn off the sales tax, if you didn’t have any sales tax, then that would be a reasonable thing to do, you could turn it off inventory.
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So with the inventory, this whole row up top in the vendor section, if you didn’t have any inventory, you could turn it off payroll, that’s going to be down here, if you didn’t have any payroll,
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you could turn off payroll, and it would be populated on the homepage. And the time tracking, you could turn off the time tracking. And again, remove it. So just check just to give an example.
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If I go to the estimate, you can see it takes me to another area in the Preferences Tab, which is now in the jobs and estimates area. And then if I simply turned off the preferences, do I create estimates if I just say no, and say OK, and OK, and then go to Company homepage.
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Now it’s going to turn off, it’s going to take away the estimates area, which again, could quite well be the case for many companies that don’t do estimates, you might want to remove it. But you can go to the Edit tab up top preferences and turn it back on.
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Now, you could go there either way, I can go straight here to the jobs and estimates, turn it back on or I can go to you can see if I go to the desktop view.
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And here’s the estimates is now off. If I click the estimates, it will take me to the jobs and estimates where I could turn it back on. Okay. Okay. Company homepage.
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And we’ve turned on the estimates, again, edit drop down preferences, we’re now going back to the desktop view, company preferences, the sales tax, same thing. So if you have sales tax, you’d have to turn on the sales tax inventory.
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That’s the other big one. You might say what if I have this up here and I don’t use inventory? You could turn inventory off, go into the inventory, it takes you to the item and inventory. You could say inventory and purchase orders are active. No, let’s say no.
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Okay. And then company preferences home page. And then you see, you don’t have that line item up top,
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you might see some companies that don’t have the inventory line item that might kind of throw you off at first you’re like what, why is that different? Because they don’t have the inventory on.
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If you go to the Edit up top preferences, then I could turn the inventory back on here, items and inventory or I could go to the desktop view company preferences.
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And I could see it’s off here. I could have that take me back to the inventory clicking on it and turn the inventory back on. Okay.
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Okay, Company tab homepage. And then the inventory line items are back up top Home tab, preferences. And then if I go into back to the desktop view,
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company preferences now I won’t turn the other two off. But just to note, if I go into sales tax, it goes takes me down to the sales tax area.
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That’s where the actual preference lies back to the desktop view. If you go to the payroll, it takes you to the payroll and employees where you can turn it on On Off,
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if I go back to the desktop view, and we go to the time tracking, it’s going to take you down to the time tracking area. So you could turn it on or off if you choose. So those are some customizations, you can do to the homepage that can make things a little bit easier. Now,
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let’s think about opening up the icon on the left hand side. Now, again, these shortcuts, to me, I don’t use them as much, because like I say, I like having the open windows open and typically toggle between the two.
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But maybe toggling between the two isn’t something you’d like you that might be a good way to go. And again, these items up top, you might like to see them on that top ribbon.
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If you just have a few that you want to see, I would think that having them on that top ribbon, I’ve seen some people like that preference up top.
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So I’m going to put the view back on the left and just let’s customize the shortcuts. So if I go into the shortcuts, and we go into all the way down to the bottom of it,
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you can customize the shortcuts. Opening up the customization, you get something looking like this, where we can add or delete. So if you wanted to add items into the shortcut, you can select an item.
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And then you can search for all the items on the left hand side that you want to add QuickBooks help for example, you got the help item, and then you can assign an icon to it if you so choose, and add it add that into your shortcut bar.
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Now notice that also says your you may add most QuickBooks windows to the icon bar using quote, add to icon bar in the View menu. This window lets you add some additional commands. So I’m going to close this back out,
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I’m going to close this back out. So in other words, if you found some particular form or some particular screen that you would like to add to the icon bar, you could go into the shortcuts here and look for it.
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Or you might try to add it from that particular place, I’m just going to go to an invoice,
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which is something that’s already in there, you might not need that particular shortcut. But just for an example, if you go to the customers and we added an invoice or opened an invoice, and I said, I would like to make a shortcut to this particular form,
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then we might go to the View drop down. And so then we have this add Create Invoice to icon bar, we can add it to the icon bar,
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we can label it invoice we can have its description, we could try to add a particular icon related to it. So that’s another way that you might be able to add stuff, it might be an easier way,
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because the things you’re looking to add are usually going to be things that you can’t easily find some other place like an invoice and which is a little bit buried or one that you are going to use quite often that you want to get to easily.
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So if you could find that particular thing and then add it from that screen, that would be nice.
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So I’m going back into the customize reports if we go into the add. So we looked at all the kind of items on the left that you can basically add here, I’m going to close this back out. And then of course, we can delete some of these items as well. And we can also reorder these items.
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So if we wanted to reorder, you can drag them and pull them up for the ordering of them. And if you want to delete them, then of course, you’re going to pick one of them and delete them.
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So I’m just going to go through some of these and just give you my ideas on what I might, you know, add or delete, I would delete most of this stuff, and then try to customize it yourself for the things that you’re you’re going to use both.
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So like the homepage, it opens automatically, it’s right in the drop down, I wouldn’t typically have that I would delete it. My company, I think that’s pretty easy to find and the company dropped down.
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So I typically wouldn’t have that I deleted cashflow hub, maybe if you’re using the cash flow hub, that might be something that you can have a shortcut to, but I’ll delete it here.
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Income tracker again, to me, that’s something that you could find fairly easy in the company center. But if you use it a lot, that might be something you keep,
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let’s keep that one just for the and then you got the bill tracker, same thing. That one’s in the vendor area, like we saw before. But it might be something if you use it a lot that you might want there. The calendar is on the homepage.
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So I would typically keep it there. I’m going to delete the calendar space, I’m not going to have any spaces, I’m going to delete the space.
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The snapshot if you use the snapshot might be something that you could use, I don’t really use it much. So I would typically delete it. Customers. I think that’s pretty easy to find in the drop down.
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So I wouldn’t typically have that there. I’m going to delete it vendors same thing pretty easy to find the drop down, I would delete it. Employees same thing pretty easy to find in the drop down. I will delete it. Delete that the docs maybe if you use the Docs a lot,
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that might be something that you might keep their reports. I think that’s pretty easy to find in the drop down. I wouldn’t put it there checks.
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I think that’s pretty easy to find. Actually that’s ordering checks. So I don’t think you got that in the homepage.
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You do that periodically? That seems like a sales thing from QuickBooks trying to sell checks, user user license again, you could find that when you need it, you wouldn’t need it very often.
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So I wouldn’t put it in my favorites. Space, no invoice, I invoice there’s like five places you could find an invoice already. So I don’t think it would be something an item.
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I wouldn’t add it here because I think you can add the items kind of as you go pretty easily, like inventory items and service items, checks. Again, there’s a ton of different places you could find the check form.
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So I wouldn’t put that there. Same with a bill form a lot of different errors, you could find a bill form the register, pretty easy to find here.
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And it’s the most common list, which I think is useful to understand as a bookkeeper that a lot of people see it as a list. So I would find it there. account,
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I think that might be chart of accounts. So looking for, which again, is a list if it is and that would be easy to find. I’m not sure what what that is if they’re talking reconcile, I don’t know,
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I’m going to delete it. Feedback. No, I’m not going to give feedback often all the time. So find maybe the find might be something useful space. No, I’m gonna say services. No, I’m going to add payroll. No, that’s an add on thing credit card.
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No, they’re trying to sell me stuff there. So no space No. So then I’d start there, and then maybe add any more that you might think is useful. I’d hit OK. And so now you’ve got on this side, a lot less stuff going on.
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And then if you wanted to use that on the top icon bar by going to the view drop down, and then going to the top icon bar, I think it’s a lot more useful if it’s not totally packed with stuff, right.
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So now if I wanted to go up here and go to My Documents, then that I could do that pretty quickly up here.
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And I could toggle if I want my open windows by going to the view drop down left bar, and then going over to the open windows this way. Well, let’s try this. If I go view top icon, view, open windows list still gives me my open windows on the left hand side.
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So you can still have your open windows open with the icon bar up top. It’s not typically how I use it, generally, but you could do that. So let’s go back to the view, let’s put it on the left hand side. So we can do that.
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Closing this back out with our items here for the favorites. And then we of course have the Favorites drop down up top. So this would probably be for people that are using maybe the open windows on the left, and then there and then and then maybe they want their other favorites up top.
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So you can customize some stuff in this particular drop down. Same kind of idea, you’d probably want to be picking things that aren’t easily found in other dropdowns up top. If I just pick something like a price level list or something and added same items over here, same idea, payroll item list added,
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you can move these to see which one you want to be up up top. And then and you could also move it up or down, you know this way. And so I’m going to say okay, and then in your favorites, you can customize some favorites up top.
18:20
So that might be another way that you’d like to have some of your customized areas. Again, I would be picking things that are difficult, basically to find, you know, in the drop down, and then add those to the favorites. So that’s just some customization.
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I think in default, that most of the stuff is pretty easy to get to that you’re using on a day to day basis. But you might want to do some customizations for particular items. And those are some ways you can do that.