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Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop sample rock castle construction practice file provided by QuickBooks going through the setup process we do every time maximizing the home page to the gray area going to the view drop down open windows list on the left hand side we're not going to open up any reports because we're focused in on some customization areas some shortcuts some items that might make the data input a little bit easier or more customizable for your particular needs and sometimes when we do some of that customization it actually makes us close all the windows and open them back up again which we don't want to have to do the three areas we will be taking a look at will be the home page are there certain icons that we can add or remove making the home page more useful the next will be the favorites on the left hand side we're currently have the open windows open which is what I use most of the time and I usually toggle this little icon down so I can see the open windows but you might want to use the shortcuts here and so you can open up the shortcuts we looked at some of the shortcuts in there automatically will go into a little bit of them in more detail and think about how we can customize those shortcuts also noting that you could in a view setting if I go to the view drop down up top instead of having those on the left hand side you could put them on the top which I think is going to be that would be useful if you actually use some of these shortcuts a lot I don't typically do that I think most people don't do that because they like to use the open windows item and so they put it on the left hand side but some people might like that so I'm going to go to the view drop down and put that back on the left and then the other area that you can customize for easier faster data input is in the favorites tab up top you can have this drop down and customize the favorites for those types of things that you would like to get to more easily possibly those types of things that are buried in a particular drop down for example they're down at the bottom or something like that and you would like to put them into the favorites area then you have that option let's first think about the homepage the homepage is a nice visual flow chart great place to go there might be some icons that you would like to include on the homepage some that you might want to remove now most of the flows in the homepage I'm going to close up the carrot on the left are there are populated due to the type of industry that has been set up so for example in the vendor section if you turn inventory off you're not going to have this top line item because you don't have the inventory tracking you'll just have the bills and the pay bills that will happen automatically when you set up the company and you tell the system that you don't have any inventory for example but there might be some items in here that you might just not use perhaps you don't ever use the sales receipt form you only use the full service or cruel form and therefore you'd like to remove the sales receipt form so it doesn't confuse you or other users of quickbooks on the staff or something like that you might be able to do some further customization to the homepage for that purpose so let's first look at that we can go to the file drop down or the edit drop down and then go to the preferences at the bottom going into the preferences we'll talk about all the preferences and more detail in a future presentation but for here we're just looking at the desktop view to see the customizations there you got the my preferences on the first tab you could choose not to show the homepage so when it opens up you don't show it I still like it I still use the homepage so every time I open up the company file the homepage opens up and that's what how I like to see it I'm going to go to the company tab the second tab and then we have some of these items so select the features that you want to show on the homepage so we have the sales receipt up here so if we're not using the sales receipt we could remove that this is the state statement and charges we could remove those if we don't use those two items so and they're not going to have an impact or tied to anything else right so we could say I'm going to uncheck those if you change something like that it usually forces you to close all the windows so be aware of that so I'm going to say okay and then it says quick books must close all the open windows I'm going to say okay and then open back up the homepage in the company drop down homepage and then let's see what happened what did it do what did it do what did you do quick books so it removed that one and again it's a little bit more streamlined and you've you've got little little less stuff happening down here and that might make the data input a little bit easier for users of the quick books so I'm going to put them back in I'm going to go to edit preferences and when the desktop view let's put those back it's going to make us close everything up again gonna say okay closes everything up company drop down homepage and maximize to the gray area they have returned now the other items are tied to the preferences in terms of how we set up the company so edit preferences if we go to the desktop company preferences you can see down here to show or hide item icons on the homepage you need to turn the feature on or off click a feature name below to view its preferences so in other words whether or not it shows on the homepage is going to be tied to whether or not you're going to use that item so if you wanted to have not have estimates then you would you would have to turn off the estimates feature which may be likely it might be in the case you might not use estimates in which case you you could turn them off to remove the sales tax item then you would have to turn off the sales tax if you didn't have any sales tax then that would be reasonable thing to do you could turn it off inventory so with the inventory this whole row up top in the vendor section if you didn't have any inventory you could turn it off payroll that's going to be down here if you didn't have any payroll you could turn off payroll and it would be populated on the homepage and the time tracking you could turn off the time tracking and again remove it so just check just to give an example if I go to the estimate you can see it takes me to another area in the preferences tab which is now in the jobs and estimates area and then if I simply turned off the preferences do I create estimates if I just say no and say okay and okay and then go to company homepage now it's going to turn it's going to take away the estimates area which again could quite well be the case for many companies that don't do estimates you might want to remove it you can go to the edit tab up top preferences and turn it back on now you could go there either way I can go straight here to the jobs and estimates turn it back on or I can go to you could see if I go to the desktop view and here's the estimates is now off if I click the estimates it will take me to the jobs and estimates where I can turn it back on okay okay company homepage and we've turned on the estimates again edit drop down preferences we're now going back to the desktop view company preferences the sales tax same thing so if you have sales tax you'd have to turn on the sales tax inventory that's the other you know big one you might say what if I have this up here and I don't use inventory you could turn inventory off go into the inventory it takes you to the item and inventory you could say inventory and purchase orders are active no let's say no okay and then company preferences homepage and then you see you don't have that line item up top you might see some companies that don't have the inventory line item that might kind of throw you off at first like what is why is that different right because they don't have the inventory on if you go to the edit up top preferences then I could turn the inventory back on here items and inventory or I could go to the desktop view company preferences and I could see it's off here I could have that take me back to the inventory clicking on it and turn the inventory back on okay okay company tab homepage and then the inventory line items are back up top home tab preferences and then if I go into back to the desktop view company preferences now I won't turn the other two off but just to note if I go in the sales tax it goes takes me down to the sales tax area that's where the actual preference lies back to the desktop view if you go to the payroll it takes you to the payroll and employees we can turn it on or off if I go back to the desktop view and we go to the time tracking it's going to take you down to the time tracking area so you can turn it on or off if you choose so those are some customizations you can do to the homepage they can make things a little bit easier now let's think about opening up the icon on the left hand side now again these shortcuts to me I don't use them as much because like I say I like having the open windows open and I'll typically toggle between the two but maybe toggling between the two isn't something you like you that might be a good way to go and again these items up top you might like to see them on that top ribbon if you just have a few that you want to see I would think having them on that top rip and I've seen some people like that preference up top so I'm going to put the view back on the left and just let's customize these shortcuts so if I go into the shortcuts and we go into all the way down to the bottom of it you can customize the shortcuts opening up the customization you get something looking like this where we can add or delete so if you wanted to add items into the shortcut you can select an item and then you can search for all the items on the left hand side that you want to add quick books help for example you got the help item and then you can assign an icon to it if you so choose and add it add that into your shortcut bar now notice it also says here you may add most quick books windows to the icon bar using quote add to icon bar in the view menu this window lets you add some additional commands so I'm going to close this back out I'm going to close this back out so in other words if you found some particular form or some particular screen that you would like to add to the icon bar you could go into the shortcuts here and look for it or you might try to add it from that particular place I'm just going to go to an invoice which is something that's already in there you might not need that particular shortcut but just for an example if you go to the customers and we added an invoice or opened an invoice and I said I would like to make a shortcut to this particular form then we might go to the view drop down and so then we have this add create invoice to icon bar we can add it to the icon bar we can label it invoice we can have its description we could try to add a particular icon related to it that's another way that you might be able to add stuff it might be an easier way because the things you're looking to add are usually going to be things that you can't easily find some other place like an invoice and which is a little bit buried or one that you are going to use quite often that you want to get to easily so if you could find that particular thing and then add it from that screen that would be nice so I'm going back into the customized reports if we go into the ad so we looked at all the kind of items on the left that you could basically add here I'm going to close this back out and then of course we can delete some of these items as well and we can also reorder these items so if we wanted to reorder you can drag them and pull them up for the ordering of them and if you want to delete them then of course you're going to pick one of them and delete them so I'm just going to go through some of these and just give you my ideas on what I might you know add or delete I would delete most of this stuff and then try to customize it yourself for the things that you are you're going to use both so like the home page it opens automatically it's right in the drop-down I wouldn't typically have that I would delete it my company I think that's pretty easy to find in the company drop-down so I typically wouldn't have that I delete it cashflow hub maybe if you're using the cashflow hub that might be something that you can have a shortcut to but I'll delete it here income tracker again to me that's something that you could find fairly easy in the company center but if you use it a lot that might be something you keep let's keep that one just for and then you got the bill tracker same thing that one's in the vendor area like we saw before but it might be something if you use it a lot that you might want there the calendar is on the home page so I would typically keep it there I'm going to delete the calendar a space I'm not going to have any spaces I'm going to delete the space the snapshot if you use the snapshot might be something that you could use I don't really use it much so I would typically delete it customers I think that's pretty easy to find in the drop-down so I wouldn't typically have that there I'm going to delete it vendors same thing pretty easy to find in the drop-down I would delete it employees same thing pretty easy to find in the drop-down I would delete it delete that the docs maybe if you use the docs a lot that might be something that you might keep their reports I think that's pretty easy to find in the drop-down I wouldn't put it there checks I think that's pretty easy to find actually that's ordering checks so I don't think you can you got that in the home page you do that periodically that seems like a sales thing from QuickBooks trying to sell checks user user license again you could find that when you need it you wouldn't need it very often so I wouldn't put it in my favorite space no invoice I invoice there's like five places you could find an invoice already so I don't think it would be something an item I wouldn't add it here because I think you could add the items kind of as you go pretty easily like inventory items and service items checks again there's a ton of different places you could find the check form so I wouldn't put that there same with the bill form a lot of different areas you could find a bill form the register pretty easy to find here and it's the most common list which I think is useful to understand as a bookkeeper that a lot of people see it as a list so I would find it there account I think that might be a chart of accounts so looking for which again is a list if it is and that would be easy to find I'm not sure what what that is if they're talking reconcile I don't know I'm gonna delete it feedback no I'm not gonna give feedback often all the time so find maybe the find might be something useful space no I'm gonna say services no I'm gonna add payroll no that's an add-on thing credit card no they're trying to sell me stuff there so no space no so then I'd start there and then maybe add any more that you might think is useful I'd hit okay and so now you've got on this side a lot less stuff going on and then if you wanted to use that on the top icon bar by going to the view drop down and then going to the top icon bar I think it's a lot more useful if it's not totally packed with stuff right so now if I wanted to go up here and go to my documents then that I could do that pretty quickly up here and I could toggle if I want my open windows by going to the view drop down left bar and then going over to the open windows this way or let's try this if I go view top icon view open windows list still gives me my open windows on the left hand side so you can still have your open windows open with the icon bar up top it's not typically how I use it generally but you could do that so let's go back to the view let's put it on the left hand side so we can do that closing this back out with our items here for the favorites and then we of course have the favorites drop down up top so this would probably be for people that are using maybe the open windows on the left and then they're and then and then maybe they want their other favorites up top so you can customize some stuff in this particular drop down same kind of idea you probably want to be picking things that aren't easily found in other drop downs up top if I just pick something like a price level list or something and add it same items over here same idea payroll item list added you can move these to see which one you want to be up top and then and you can also move it up or down you know this way and so I'm gonna say okay and then in your favorites you can customize some favorites up top so that might be another way that you like to have some of your customized areas again I would be picking things that are difficult basically to find you know in the drop down and then add those to the favorites so that's just some customization I think in default that most of the stuff is pretty easy to get to that you're using on a day-to-day basis but you might want to do some you know customizations for particular items and those are some ways you can do that