Your customer database is your company’s most valuable asset. Thorough customer records can improve your customer relationships.
Creating comprehensive, accurate customer profiles in QuickBooks Online takes time, but also reaps big rewards. It can certainly be tempting to enter only the minimum information required to process transactions, but there are numerous benefits to including as much detail to your client profiles as QuickBooks Online allows – and making sure they’re correct. Maximizing the information you put into your client profiles in Quickbooks can allow you to:
Complete deeper, more insightful searches.
Pull more focused financial reports by filtering by more criteria.
Improve your marketing by making your efforts more targeted.
Communicate with your communication from a more informed place
How to Bulk Import Customer Files from Excel, Google Sheets, Outlook, or Gmail into QuickBooks Online
You can import customer files directly into QuickBooks Online if you have them saved in the following formats: CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets. Click Sales in the toolbar, then Customers. In the upper right corner, click the down arrow next to New Customer and select Import Customers. You can look at a sample file before you import CSV or Excel files. Note: the top row of your file must contain a header title for each column, not customer data, for the import to be successful.
After you’ve browsed for and selected your data file, click Next to open the“mapping” page. Here, you can match each field in your file to the corresponding fields in QuickBooks Online, as shown in the image below (let us know if you want our help with this). Click Next again to see your customer data in a table. If it looks OK, click Import to bring the file into QuickBooks Online.
Before you can import CSV or Excel files, make sure your data is headed to the right location by "mapping" the correct final destination for each of your data file fields.
For data in a Google Sheet, you can connect directly to the document to import a customer file. For contact information that resides in Outlook or Gmail, you can import them into QuickBooks Online once you've exported that data from Outlook or Gmail into an Excel or Google Sheet (whatever makes more sense based on your preferred workspace)
TIP: Did you know that Account Ability Consulting can also service your Microsoft subscription needs? Reach out to us for more information!
How to Create a Customer Record in QuickBooks Manually
If you don’t have an existing customer database (or you want to avoid the bulk import process), you can manually enter your customer data into QuickBooks Online using QBO's customer record templates. Return to Sales | Customers and click New customer in the upper right. A vertical panel slides out from the right side of the page containing labeled blank fields for your customer data.
As we said, the only field that’s required to create and save a customer record is Customer display name. But of course, you will want to complete more fields to make your customer data as useful as possible! If you’re unsure about some things or plan to collect additional information later, you can always come back and edit the record. The icons in the upper right will help you quickly navigate to other sections of the Client contact record.
Keep in mind that some of these fields are to be used for information that will appear automatically on invoices. If you specify, for example, what the customer’s default Primary payment method, Terms, and Sales form delivery options are, they will be automatically selected when you create a sales form, though you can change them on the fly.
There are a few important fields that you may want our assistance with:
Tax rate,
Tax exempt status, and,
Opening balance
TIP: As always, we strongly advise that you avoid modifying an Opening balance on your own. We are happy to assist if such an edit is necessary, but oftentimes, there is a better accounting solution. We've seen many a small business seek our help after an opening balance adjustment was made in error!
If you need more customer information or wish to track anything more regularly, consider using custom fields! We can help you implement custom fields that fit your business's needs.
Viewing Your Completed Customer Profiles in QuickBooks Online
You can view a great deal of customer information and take related actions on customer pages that have greater detail.
Once you’ve completed and saved a Customer record, it will appear in the Customers list as a table. The last column on this page, the Action column, provides links to all of the actions you can take related to that customer, like Create sales receipt and Send reminder.
To open the customer's "homepage," click anywhere in the row. This homepage contains the information you just entered, plus related QuickBooks data that will be displayed automatically. You can click tabs to see important information in list form, including the customer’s Transactions, Statements, and Customer Details, as pictured above. You can also create new transactions from this page, too!
What is a Sub-Customer in QuickBooks Online and How to Use this Feature
You may have noticed a line at the bottom of the Name and contact section that reads Is a sub-customer. You might create sub-customer records if you wanted to “nest” a customer or job under a “parent” customer. For example, if you were a contractor, you might want to set up different properties (like “Guest House”) as sub-customers and assign billable products and services to them. You can choose to have the billing go to the parent customer, of course, as pictured in the image below.
You can designate customer records as sub-customers for specific jobs and have them billed to the parent customer.
Better Customer Data at Your Fingertips
If you’re intentional about creating comprehensive customer records, it will be easy to answer customer inquiries more quickly when they call. You'll also be able to make more informed decisions through the use of more precise report preparation. By keeping your client data up-to-date and complete, QuickBooks Online can better serve you as a single source of truth for your business. Updating these records may require more work up front, but the effort will result in less work in the future--and a lower likelihood of error.
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