Linda Artesani walks through QuickBooks Labs' Import Style tool, showing how to upload a custom invoice template and map fields to match a law firm's legacy format. She demonstrates a real migration where the tool satisfied both an older partner wanting the original design and a younger one preferring modern styling.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be doing some shorter videos. I'll be traveling, visiting my grandkids, and then heading across to California, visiting Matthew, and also going to council meeting and going to Scaling New Heights. So we've got kind of a whirlwind, whirlwind tour happening. And I wanted to just have a couple of videos for some short tips. On QuickBooks, things that maybe you didn't even know were there, and that maybe you can investigate on your own. So I'm going to take you to my screen. So here's Scaling New Heights right here, predominant right on the page, right? If you're a QuickBooks Online accountant version, which is the Community Live version, is that you'll see that there's a little advertisement so you can learn how to coach your customers. And it's, it's a new conference for me. I have not been to this one. So it's something that you may want to look into. The time is kind of running out for it. But just if you're watching this video, if you're near the Salt Lake City area, we'll get to do that too. Another thing I want to show you is the 5 for $5 deal. This is a deal that I am still surprised they're offering. And to its offering, you get 5 QuickBooks files for $5 each. So $60 a month, and you're going to get 5 of these. It's the Plus version, which is incredible because it's like going to be $70 a month coming up. You're going to get 5 of these and I use one, I save one, actually have 2, I saved 2. One I've saved for a sample file that I use for law firm stuff, and I have it hooked up to my sample lien law file. And the other one I have is kind of my dumping zone. It's my little playground. It's not really full of data per se, but it's my place to test things out. So I use that, and then the other 3 I've given to clients. So I would recommend, if you didn't get this deal, get this deal, because I don't know if they're ever going to give this one back again. This is something I keep going every time. This time when it came out, I was like, oh my God, grabbed it right away. So I am in the QuickBooks Online accountant file. So I just wanted to show you here where there's a couple of things that you might not know are there. So this is the gear wheel, right? It's the place where there's settings and kind of one-time things. This is QuickBooks Labs. And this is a place that— it's the high-tech playground. It's a place where they're trying some features out. And if you are interested, you can turn them on and try them for yourself. I did a video already on the QuickBooks invoicing for Gmail, and I'll link back to it in the, in the notes. Smart Scan the Books. I have turned this on in my own file. I've actually turned it on a few client files. I've not really gone into it too much. It doesn't really find things other than if I have a check without a payee or things like that. I think I did a video on that. I'll also link that back in the notes. This is the one I love, Import Style. So this one, when it's turned on, and it's so simple to turn it on, you can turn it on or turn it off. I'm going to turn it off. It's going to actually ask me to give notes and feedback to them. You know, let them know if you love it or not. So we are actually working on a client file. Sarah Prevost and I are working on a big rebuild from a law firm account that was in a desktop program that was very law-specific, but desktop, right? They wanted to move to the cloud. So the younger partner who just joined the firm And turn this back on. He just joined the firm and he's the one pushing to move everything to QuickBooks Online. So we're doing this massive rebuild of this other platform into QuickBooks Online. So it came time to talk about the invoice. And the older partner said, here's the invoice we have from the other one. I want my invoice in QuickBooks Online to look exactly like it. The younger partner was like, nope, I want to go with the newer modern style that QuickBooks has. Then we did the light and airy and he loved it. So in order to do and create that form, we had to turn that feature on in the playground into the Intuit Labs. So once it's turned on, I'm going to come back to the gear and then come over here to custom form styles, and that will generate this import style section that wouldn't be there if I didn't turn it on in Labs. So I've already downloaded this template. Let me open it up for Here's my invoice. And it's got— this is my secret decoding of the fields as they map back to QuickBooks. So as you can see here, you want to have it on your invoice sample company name with the, with the brackets because you want it to be able to read the company name and it will put that on the invoice. Business number, all these things are in here. Company TIN, he wanted that on the file that was on his other invoice. So I actually took that and put it on his invoice, the sample. It came out looking exactly like his invoice that he was accustomed to, and he was a happy camper. So he's going to use that style. The other partner is going to use a newer one, and it worked out perfectly. So here's that invoice sample. As you can see, here's, you know, the ship date, and this is the master category. You can put whatever you want for a header and then use the, use the coding from that other sheet so that it pulls that data out of QuickBooks and maps it to these these places. So it's a really good tip to be able to use this for your customer that they may not know is— you might not even know that that's available. You may have come into this invoice and found that maybe you're like, all I can do is the things that are here. So maybe you want to have this look different. The way to make it look different and have more ability to make it look different, obviously you can come here and start to, you know, map it around and work on these little sections and Maybe rearrange and maybe take something off and, you know, update the file. But you're kind of restricted to what's here. And you can work on the labels and widths. And they've come a long way on this too. There's a lot more that you can do here that you couldn't do before. But if you need to have a specific identical invoice style, this is the way to go, is to pull in that template. And I use the template itself and I mapped it and moved it around and made it look exactly like what the partner was looking at, what he was looking for. And so I kept the older partner happy. We worked with the younger partner and had him right on a screen share. And we just worked through exactly what he wanted to see. And the younger partners got his template, the older partners got his template. The bookkeeper is happy because now she's pleased both of them. And it's working out fabulously. So that's just my little tip on one feature. We'll work through in the next couple of weeks on some other hidden things, little gems that you may not even know exist. But I hope that was helpful, and if you have any questions or comment or feedback, let me know, and I hope you have a wonderful week.
