and now we will learn how to manage your clients data there are two places in QuickBooks that allow
you to manage your clients information one of them is the customer center and the other are
the customer or client specific reports and we will examine both of these areas right here in
this video the customer center allows you to add edit delete and make inactive any client it
looks like a Rolodex or a database of customers that allows you to access any information about
your clients with just a few clicks you can see all the transactions you have ever had with a
client and you can take notes and update the notes about the clients right inside their own records
so now let's imagine that this is an abbreviated list of some law firms set of clients I only added
a few piece of data with just three clients just so you can see how the customer center
would work from the main menu you would open it by clicking customer customer center and then
the customer center opens up you should have a tab here for customer jobs and another tab here
for transactions click for customer jobs and you'll notice that you have an area down here
that will show you all of the transactions for any customer after they're added so if we want
to add Allen RB and one-one-one first Street all we have to do is go to the top left of the
customer center and click new customer new customer and then we put in his name Allen
RB okay maybe you want to make an in capital of course you would normally put all his other
information like his phone number his website and so on but we will just put an address now
of course there are other tabs of information that allow you to give payment in payment
settings if you could accept credit card or job info if there on any kind of specific
job but this is basically Alan's record and when we click OK you can see that Alan has
been added to the customer list on the left let's add Betty Boop everything is the same
with her except she's the second customer so we go new customer new customer Betty Boop
and now you could see when we click OK and click OK again and click OK a third time you can see
you click here and then you would glance down in this area to see any information or all of
Allens transactions but if you wanted to see Betty's transactions or additional information
about Betty you would click here and all of her transactions would show up in this panel if you've
had the client for many years and have many many transactions with that client such as invoices and
payments you could filter this list that will come up at the bottom by week by month and so
forth so you could narrow down the transactions you want to see one of the best things regarding
this Center is you can take notes for a specific client for example if I want to remember that
Betty is allergic to a peanut butter I want to click here and I will click in the notes while
Betty is selected and in the bottom left I'll click add new note and I would write don't offer
butter finger bars she is allergic or however you would spell it or whatever you would want to
do so then you could click date and time stamps so that you remember you wrote a specific note
that had spelling mistakes at a specific date and time for Betty then click OK you see this
way if you ever want to find out what you wrote about Betty you could open the Customer Center
click on Betty's name and then you would see if you click on the notes tab here you would
see all of the notes that you wrote and the date and times that they were written this will help
associate attorneys work on the same client and communicate with each other about significant
things that we need to remember about the client now let's finish this section by adding candy to
the customer do you remember how to do that new customer new customer type in candy Charles and
of course we would put her address or any other information about her and we could always double
click and edit this window and now we have all three clients on our client list and now we can
examine the reports the two reports that will be the most helpful to you when managing your
clients are the customer balance detail in the open invoice the customer balance detail allows
you to see the running balance of each client it shows every invoice and payment so you can know
who owed what at any given point in time let's just open it up now now it will be blank we can
go ahead and close the customer Center it will be blank until we start having transactions and
the coming videos then it will unfold and make perfect sense that this report will help you
manage your customers balance from the main menu click reports customers and receivables customer
bounds detail now at the moment the window is in front of you you can click view add customer
balance detail to the icon bar and then click OK the other report that will be helpful to you is
the open invoice the open invoice report shows only the invoices that remain unpaid if you did
not apply payments or credit to an invoice it will show on this report as open or unpaid and
again that will unfold in future videos but right now we're just going to set it up in the icon bar
reports customers and receivables open invoice after you open the open invoice report make it
look the way you'd like it to look for example we know we don't need purchase order number so
we can remove a column the way you would remove column in Excel move the mouse to the three dots
to the top right of the column until the mouse pointer becomes a double arrow click and drag
it past the left boundary and that column has disappeared then you can click on the
pull down arrow and choose all meeting we want to show all open invoices regardless of date
and now that the report looks the way you want it to look click view ad open invoices to the
icon bar and click OK congratulations your customer data is all set up and ready to go