To operate a business you must have customers. You may or may not know or have their name, depending on the type of business you are running. If it’s a retail convenience store you probably don’t know their name yet so you will just be entering sales. Suppose however you are running a business where you have the names and contact information of your clients because you perform work for them in the form of a service. You don’t sell product, but you sell your time in the form of filming events, weddings in particular.

You will also need to have a list of vendors, or suppliers that you purchase goods and services from. We’ll get to that later in the next post called QuickBooks Online Suppliers.

All of the customer data is under Sales in the left panel menu. When you click Sales you’ll see the following menu choices: Overview, All sales, Invoices, Estimates, Payment links, Customers, and Products and services. If it’s the very first time you are opening the customers window, you get a choice of importing or adding manually. Back “in the day” we used a Rolodex.

The only required field is Customer Display Name. The other fields are for convenience. You’ll notice that the required field has a star after its name signifying that it’s required. Of course you can enter as many customers as you’d like, even if they haven’t purchased anything yet.

Editing a Customer

You can always go back to a customer and add or edit information. Sales, Customers will show the following screen with your customers listed, not these. Click right on the name in the list to edit the customer’s data.