How to Identify Customers in Quickbooks

Identify customers quickly using Quickbooks.

The flippant answer to this question on how to identify customers in Quickbooks is "that depends." In truth, that is the answer. The question really should be how do you want to identify them and why. There are several ways to identify customers in a Quickbooks file by using the "Type" designation.

Things You'll Need

• Quickbooks software
• A list of your customers

Instructions

Identifying Customers in Quickbooks

1. Understand the "Type" of customer designation. The use of the Type category is to fit your customers into one of two, or several different categories. Wholesale, retail, club membership and more. If your business is a lawn-care service, you may want to designate some clients as commercial and others as residential. Doing so allows you to set discounts on all merchandise automatically for all "Seniors," or "Students." Since you have assigned this Type to that customer, the discount fills in each time they make a purchase with you without having to go in and alter the price on the invoice. This is done through the use of price levels.

2. Create a report of all your customers. You do this by going to the "Reports," then "Customers and Receivables," and finally "Customer Contact List." Modify the report to include type designations and at a glance you can see, depending on how you originally set up the type, the information you are seeking.

   For example, if you own a retail store and you type customers as "Students" and "Seniors" to apply appropriate discounts, you can generate a report to tell how much revenue is brought in by each group, what items are being sold to each group, and likely be able to make decisions on future product orders.

   If you choose to make the "Type" designation a way to track advertising effectiveness, you can create a type each time you begin a different marketing campaign to see which is the most effective at bringing paying customers into your store. In this case the "Types" would be; yellow pages, direct mail, newspaper ad, or word of mouth.

3. Make the difficult decisions. If your goal as a retail store owner was to cater to a hip-hop clientele but the demographic and sales reports reveal that more than half of your paying customers are seniors, you may want to rethink your merchandise, or your location. The reports that can be generated by using this feature are invaluable to the business owner seeking to focus his/her business on the right products/services to the right customers.

4. Don't get too specific. If you don't have a business with both retail and wholesale customers, and you decide to use the Type feature to track sales to demographics, at best you want maybe four categories: "Student," "Senior," "Family," and "Other." If you start expanding into specific ages with seven designations, it would be a census worker's dream, but way too much for a small business owner.