Data Entry Shortcuts for Lists

If you frequently add or edit more than one customer, vendor, or item at a time, working in a New or Edit window (like New Customer or Edit Item) isn’t only tedious, but it also takes up time you should spend on more important tasks, like selling, managing cash flow, or finding out who has the incriminating pictures from the last company party.

 

If you set up your company file using the EasyStep Interview, it helps you bring information in from an email program or Excel (page 14), and you can use that same window anytime you want to add more customers or vendors (by choosing Company→Bulk Enter Business Details). Another option is the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries feature, which you can use to paste data from Excel into QuickBooks when you’re creating customers, vendors, or items. Or, to edit existing records, you can filter or search the list in that window to show just the customers, vendors, or items you want to update, and then paste in Excel data, type in values, or copy values between records. This chapter shows you how to perform all these tasks.

Then again, you might store info about customers, vendors, and items in other programs such as a database or word-processing program where you create mailing labels. If your other programs can create Excel-compatible files or delimited text files, you can avoid data-entry grunt work by transferring data to or from QuickBooks. (Delimited text files are simply files that separate each piece of data with a comma, space, tab, or other character.) In both types of files, the same kind of info appears in the same position in each line or row, so QuickBooks (and other programs) can pull the information into the right places. When you want to transfer a ton of data from another program into QuickBooks, importing is the way to go. By mapping QuickBooks’ fields to the fields in the other program, you can quickly transfer hundreds or even thousands of records. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the keywords QuickBooks uses to put your data into the correct fields and how to get your import file set up to work with QuickBooks. The chapter wraps up by explaining the steps for importing data into your company file.