QuickBooks Tips :: New QuickBooks Company Files
2. Add your Employees via QuickBooks > Employee Center and your Brokers via QuickBooks > Vendor Center. For the Brokerage/Outside Representative companies, you should add just the main company that you pay the commission check to and add the word ‘Vendor’ or ‘Commissions’ in their name (e.g. Valk Sales – Commissions) to differentiate if you ever invoice them for samples which would require them to be added to your Customer list via TurnLink in the future with just their company name (e.g. Valk Sales).
3. Add to the Sales Rep List, via QuickBooks > Lists > Customer & Vendor Profiles > Sales Rep List, the reps for each of your inside sales people who may key orders into TurnLink which can be linked to the Employee version of that inside sales person if you have added them to the Employee Center (in step 2). Add your brokers and outside sales reps who you may be reporting and paying Commissions on orders they generate to this list as well. You can make an entry for each individual sales rep at a brokerage company if you would like or just make one entry to represent the whole firm depending on how deeply you wish to report on that information. Note: The initials field is will be the field to synchronize with the TurnLink Contact information.
In TurnLink, you can set the Initials for your Inside Users via Setup > Users and then edit each user. For your brokers, in TurnLink they will be created as Company Type ‘Outside Sales Representative’, and the initials are edited and associated with each Contact in the Contacts module of the Company Overview. Companies will often use the same initials for all of the contacts in an Outside Sales Company so that in QuickBooks it is all attributed to the one company (e.g. TLM for Topline Marketing) but in TurnLink you know which of the individual reps at the brokerage firm actually placed the order. You can choose to have them all be separate in QuickBooks, of course, but most people do not need that level of detail in their reporting.
4. Customize your QuickBooks templates to your liking. If your company creates Sales Orders when an order comes into QuickBooks and then changes them to Invoices when they ship, then you should customize a Sales Order template to include the fields, fonts, logos or other data that is important to your process. You can place a test Order in the ‘Test Store’ in your TurnLink account and then queue it to QuickBooks to see where things layout as there are many fields in QuickBooks that you can use to customize your Sales Order. Then, customize an Invoice Template that you will use when you ship the actual order (after converting the original Sales Order). Your Invoice may display less, more or different data than your Sales Order does. If your company wishes to create Invoices immediately, that is also an option when queuing orders within TurnLink.
5. The QuickBooks Ship Manager that is built-in to the Desktop version is quite helpful as you can create either FedEx or UPS (and USPS in 2012 versions and higher) bar codes from inside QuickBooks in the actual Invoice as you are creating and printing the document to coincide with your shipment. QuickBooks will create and print the shipment paperwork and paste the tracking number to the final invoice that can be saved in QuickBooks eliminating the need for you to enter or import addresses into any of the website or desktop programs provided by the shipping companies.
6. In the TurnLink Company Overview > Order Form you can denote a line item as a sample which allows it to be tracked while zeroing out the price in the TurnLink order to differentiate it from actual product which is sold. When this box is checked, and an order is synched to QuickBooks, it causes one line item with the normal price for the item and then a negative line item, which is setup in the QuickBooks Item List as type ‘Discount’, to make the price to the client $0. This will properly move the line item out of the QuickBooks inventory and still invoice it to trigger Cost of Goods for the product and give reportable data on dollar value of samples given to new accounts, trade and consumer events. On Setup > Services > QuickBooks you can specify which QuickBooks Item Discount you want the sample checkbox functionality to map to when invoicing orders that use this functionality.
7. All TurnLink Promotions that will synchronize with QuickBooks as Off Invoice discounts need to map to a corresponding QuickBooks Item of type Discount. In Setup > Promotion > Promotion Schedule you will specify which Item and which Account you want the TurnLink Promotions to map to in your QuickBooks Sales Order/Invoice.
8. Make sure that your QuickBooks Item list has an item named ‘Subtotal’ of type ‘Subtotal’. If it does not, please enter QuickBooks and add a new Item of type ‘Subtotal’ named ‘Subtotal’ which TurnLink will use when synchronizing orders to properly compute discounts.