Template and Vendor Credit Issues in QuickBooks Mac

Recently we received a question from a QuickBooks Mac business accounting software user about trying to repurpose fields on the Invoice template. As you might know in QuickBooks bookkeeping programs for Mac 2013, in customize invoice template, there is a choice of about 7 fields you can add. The client was utilizing all of them, and they wanted one of them to be for entering text, but it is preformatted to be a date. Their question was if there is a way to override the formatting of the fields. And unfortunately, the answer is no, you cannot change the format of these fields in you accounting business software. All you can change is the name. If the format is date, if you try to put any data in that field other than a date – you will receive an error message that this cannot be done. Also, if you do rename the field another downside would be that the standard title of the field still appears in filters even if you edited the name to something else. An alte ate method would be to use the custom fields in either the item or customer list as these fields can be free text. You can then add these fields to the invoice template. Another issue that came up while working with a client yesterday on QuickBooks Mac 2011, we noticed that when she goes to pay multiple bills from one vendor, if there is a credit to use, QuickBooks does not ask her which bills to apply the credit to. It would just pick one bill at random and deduct the amount of the credit. After speaking with Intuit Technical support, we found that this is what the program was designed to do and there is no way to stop it from doing that. The good news is that we a have a little work-around. Our QuickBooks advisor team instructed the client to go into Pay Bills and only check off the credit and the 1 bill that she wants to use that credit against. Create that check and then go back into Pay Bills and check off the rest of the bills and create another check for those. By doing this, you can be sure that QuickBooks takes the credit off the correct bill. The only downside is that you have to send your vendor 2 checks. If/when Intuit makes a change to this feature of the QuickBooks bookkeeping programs, we will be sure to let you know.