The Power Behind QuickBooks Online Advanced Custom Fields

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I'm wearing a nice tank top here for to show my friend Dan. He sent me this. Actually asked him, "Can you please give me one of your shirts?" Because I love the name of his company, Ignite Spot. So he's got a pretty cool company. He's out in Salt Lake City, and he's a really cool guy. So hi, Dan. Thank you for sending me this shirt. Love it. Fits great. But the task at hand. for today is it's all about custom fields this week. I wanted to really jump into the power behind the custom fields feature in, in the QuickBooks Online Advanced product. You do get custom fields in the Plus version and the lower versions, but it's not as powerful. You get 10 custom fields, 3 of which are for customer-facing, and then the rest can be for transactions. So it's a pretty powerful tool. And if you think back, I think back to the Enterprise Solutions days and how excited I was to get in and see how you can manipulate the data and use those custom fields. with the dropdown list, with the calendar list. It's really, really cool. And it's actually, if you know all the features in advance, you might actually put a client into it with that you may not have even thought to put into it, but it's actually going to work better for the client and for you doing the work that it might save you time, right? It's all about saving time and automating things and making things more efficient. When you start to get into automation, starting to get into a place of getting data in more accurately. So that's really the reason why behind the need to— once you start getting into the automating everything, the more you automate, the better off you are. So let's jump into QuickBooks Online Advanced, and I'll show you what the power is behind that. And then I'll take you into a sample file to show you what it looks like in just a Simple Plus version, which it's not as powerful, but you do have that there. So let's jump into QuickBooks Online Advanced. So here we are now in my sample QuickBooks Online Advanced program. And it's easy access to get to your picture here. It's easy access to get to the place where the custom fields lie. So you just go to the gear, your settings, and you can come in here and you can see custom fields new. So I can click in here. And that's going to bring me to this page right here. And I can add as many as I want. So these are just a few that I've come up with, with working with attorneys. Sometimes there's an originating attorney and then the originating attorney passes it over to another attorney. So there's sometimes a need to stay with the originating attorney, but all the invoicing would go into under the attorney that's actually working on the records. then. There's also— we have also an accident date. So if you work with a personal injury attorney, you'll find that that's a good field to have if there's an original accident, or even if you're working with a criminal lawyer, and when was the incident, right? So you could call that incident date. Original trust, if you're working with an estate planning lawyer that has a lot of different— a lot of times when you get working with an estate planner, you can start out with a trust. I have a trust, I have a trust, and then it changes. And then sometimes it's the restated trust of blah blah blah and the date changes. So maybe you want that original trust date. So you've got that ability. So when you add a field, and I'll take you into the trust ones, you can see when, when you add a field, you can have it show on a sales form. And that would be for me to see it on a sales form. If you want the customer to see that, you just click that box. So that's that ability. So there's the ability— I made it a date type. So let me go into one here. This is the one I really like because when you go into here, You can see that I can make a dropdown list so I can include an active or I can take an active off my list. I can also show it to the customer. So maybe I want to show it to the customer who the originating attorney was and now how it's going to another, you know, another attorney, or I can just leave it just on the sales form itself. So it's internal or useful internally. So the other thing that we have besides the dropdown and the date list is a text or number field. So Let me just hit Save here and we'll make a new one. So we'll add a new field here. And I'll just do customer again. And I have the ability here to pick the type. So it could be anything really that I want to put in here. For me, when I work with customers, when I work with real estate, a lot of times I'll want to have— for customer info, I might want to have if they have a pet. So you can select that type. And I can come over here and say, I can make a dropdown list. This would be a perfect one for a dropdown list, right? So I could do cat, We only allow certain pets. Dog, we don't allow. You know, you could have fish. I mean, you could add another line. It could be fish. Really, fish don't count. But when it's cat or dog, usually they can have damage in the apartment. So I want to track which tenant has a cat or a dog. Generally with a fish, you don't. But there's other animals, I suppose you could add bunny or whatever here too, right? So this is another one that's good for, for real estate firms. So there's also— let's see, we can go in here too. Let's come in here for another customer one. For a tenant, maybe I want to have lease date, original lease date, renewal lease date. So I want to track that because now I'm going to be able to sort on a report the dates, right? So this is the whole point of it. You want to sort on the report the dates. And then I can do a report and memorize the report every single, every single month to come up and populate in the order of the closest to the date that we're having so that the— I can have that go to the admin. And she'll know who to send out lease renewals to. So that's a good use case for real estate company, then obviously you would pick the date type. But as you can see here, there's also number and text. So you have the choice to do that too. Try to— if you can use the other ones, use the other ones. For example, the dropdown list is real powerful because it stops typos and things like that where the list would grow. If you're using just text, maybe you're going to have like, you know, a name spelled wrong or spelled differently, like maybe Susan S as opposed to Susan. There's only one Susan. But if people are starting to type the text, then it's harder for the reports. You might find that there's a whole bunch of Susans and there's a few Susan S's. They're all the same person. So using the dropdown will, will stop that happening. You can, with a number, you can put in the number, but you can put like a dot. So I use this for, I use this for a matter, matter number. So we had one firm that wanted to have original matter. They changed their They changed their way of doing their billing when they switched from PC Law to QuickBooks. So they had a different matter and it used to populate the numbers, but they changed their numbering because they switched to QuickBooks and LeanLaw. So we want— but the one of the partners in the firm wanted to see that number because he knew the, knew the files by the numbers. So we just put that in there and then we just use the numbers system and then we use that for a field. So that's another use case for attorneys. So there's a lot of ways you can really, really think creatively of how you can attach and use these for customers. But also in these fields, you can use them for transactional info. This is nice to use for like vendors and maybe POs or anything like that. So you can use this for a lot of things. So you're only allowed 3 to be customer-facing on a customer level. You— we already have like 3 of them there. You don't want to put more than that though, because you can get really crazy and do that on an invoice where you've got so many fields. It's confusing, right? What do you really need to— if you want to, you could write up a wish list. This is what I've done with clients. I'll write up a wish list. What do you really want with your client? What does the client really want? Especially when we do a rebuild from an old, older program like PC Law to QuickBooks. What is most important to you? Put the list down, put everything you'd like to see on the invoice on a list. And then we had the partners do all that. And then they went back and they looked at the list. And then they said— I said, put them all in order of what you think is the most important. And that really narrowed down the list. So we put it all together, put it on a spreadsheet and said, okay, you know, okay, clients, this is what was found to be true, what you all wanted that was the most important. What was the one thing on here that's like, you know, no bueno, if it's not on, I'm not gonna be happy with QuickBooks. So we did it in that fashion. So that way, kept the client happy. And it was really, it was really powerful when we put it on there and everybody likes it. And then I started to show them the reporting. So let me go back here. And these are the things that if you don't know QuickBooks Online Advanced, then you're not going to know these things that, that are here and available. You're just gonna think QuickBooks doesn't do that. It actually does. So there's a lot of things in QuickBooks Online Advanced. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to write and really research and get deep into the nitty-gritty of these, of all the, the posts that are out there, all the articles that have been written, because you really see some of the ways people think about it. And they think, outside the box for some of these custom fields. And I think I had it happen with a client myself that the client was not really someone that had to be in— they would— they did fixed fee billing. They didn't have a giant chart of accounts because they were, they were set up to just do regular AR. They had a large client list, but they didn't have a large— they didn't have a large account list. So they really weren't in that. But when I saw the— saw the advanced or the accelerated invoicing feature, that was like, this is what they need because it's going to save them time, create a new workflow that made more sense. It was less painful. to go through because every month they were sending out 2,000 or more invoices. And it saved so much time in the new workflow that the girl that was doing this major billing freed up so much more time, she was able to work at a higher level in another part of the business. They moved her, they were going to hire somebody else to do this job and they actually shifted her over to doing that because she didn't have to spend so much time on the invoicing. And we added merchant services in. So they had this other merchant service thing that was costing them more money. And with Intuit Merchant Services, it automated. So it actually freed up a full-time job between doing the automated Intuit Merchant Services and then using Accelerated Income, Accelerated Invoices. So those 2 changes in their workflow and moving to the cloud and out of desktop in PC Law and moving to the cloud, those were the things that were like the light bulb went off. And you should see their faces even when I showed them even Hubdoc. It was like, wow, I don't have to type all the numbers in. So these are things a lot of people don't even know. And they're time savers and they're more accurate. Letting the workflow happen in Intuit Merchant Services is so helpful for them because with 2,000 invoices a month or more, if people pay on the payment link, that just takes away— and they're still going to have people walking in, they're still going to have people with cash and checks because of the nature of their business. They're an immigration law firm. They're still going to have that. They'll never eliminate it. But at least they can eliminate— even if 50% of the people pay with the payment link, That's just— that's half. That's 1,000 invoices. It's so, so powerful. So let me just go here to where this shows up on the, on the actual card. I call it customer card. And it's probably going back to the desktop days of QuickBooks when I used to work on QuickBooks Desktop. I think that's what we called it. So where these custom fields lie for customers is right into the— go right into your customer, edit the customer. And as you can see, you've got notes, tax information, payment and liability, and payment and billing, where you can come in here and put the credit card in and use it over and over again. That's also helping the immigration firm because they, they bill out on fixed fee packages and the person pays in 3 increments. And to have that there and somebody can call up and say, hey, process my card, is just so easy. Language. This is one of the features they really love because it's got— you can put down the language that the person speaks and you can put it right in their cards so that way it can maybe trigger if that comes up when they're talking to somebody that's somebody in their office that speaks Spanish or speaks French or whatever, but it's— they've got the ability to shift that over when that customer comes and calls. When it gets past that point, they can put somebody on that speaks the language back. Attachments, you can attach any documentation there. But here's your custom, custom fields. So you can see here, these are the ones I created. And you can do originating original attorney, original trust if you're working with law firms, the accident date if you're working with an attorney or personal injury, or you could do incident date if it was like if you're working for a criminal lawyer. Pet, obviously for real estate, you can have cat or dog, you can pick cat. Lease date, you can put the lease date in here. Really, you can get as creative as possible here. Original matter date. So there's lots of places here we can go through. So let me go over to the proper trust reporting. So here's a sales by customer detail report. None of those custom fields are on there, but I can actually add them really quickly right here. So I can do original trust, I can do accident date. I think I have some of this data, these data points on here. So you can actually put these on and have them populate in the report itself. So let me just click that way out of there. Let's pull them up. So you're, like I said, you're only allowed 3 in the customer-facing. And here's like original trust, and I can, I can sort by original trusts, I can bring all the ones with the original trust date up and have them there. So if you've got different kinds of law firms that you're working with, if the law firm uses has sells different things. Maybe that's a big law firm that's kind of multipurpose and it does estate planning, but it does something else and you've got custom fields for those types, you can sort the list that way. So it's going to show the detail and, you know, with law firm invoices, you can see this is invoice number 1037. So it's going to have a lot of line items because that's how law firms work. They have a lot of line items for every time they bill, they do all that hourly billing. So you can see there and they have a lot of costs that are involved when they sell back you know, they pay for things and then they charge the client back. And there's a total of anything that was done with the original trust tag on it. And you can see over here, the disorderly conduct tag is on this one. So it's sorting it by that. And then you can come down here and you can see how I've got this sorted out by— so this is just how it came through it. I sorted by original trust, but you can sort by whatever you want to do, original attorney, whatever, and just hit Run Report. So it's very, very simple when we come into here and see the accident date. So I've got those on there. So that is how the reports work with the custom fields. So it's a pretty powerful tool. And you can obviously export to Excel and do whatever you want to do with the, the data here. So now I'm going to shift over to my regular QuickBooks Plus file so I can show you the 3 custom fields there. So you can see the contrast and the power behind the ones in QuickBooks Online Advanced. So here we are in my handy dandy law firm file. And if I come over here to the gear, there's nothing here that says custom fields because it doesn't show up in that place. So if I want to see the custom fields, there's 3, I can come into custom form styles. And I can just grab my custom form here and hit content, and then come up to the top because I believe that's where you get the content where you can put those fields in. So here they are in the display section, I can add my custom fields. So I could do partner, I could do date of accident. I could do original attorney. So I'm typing in the custom field, but I want to show you how that works. So now I've got that in there. Let's go over to sales. Let's just grab Mary Smith's invoice, we'll grab it, and then we'll show you where it shows up. So as you know, notice I didn't have the ability to put a date or dropdown in that, that doesn't have that ability in this program. So I could do the partners, Linda Artesani, the date is, you know, 12/13/18. And the originating attorney is Sarah. So I add her name, I have to type it all in though, as you can see this a little bit more. If this was the other file, I'd have a dropdown, just pick it really fast. Date of accident, pick the date. So it's pretty, pretty simple and straightforward. There's a lot of chance of typing the wrong thing in or a typo. So let's navigate over to a report. Let's pick that same report, Sales by Customer Detail. And you will have the ability to put these fields on here. I'm going to come right over to this gear, and then hit Show More. And you can see original attorney is here, date of accident. So they're here. And then I can just hit the refresh button here, that one with Sarah. So you can see here, here it is with Sarah, she's populating up here, date of accident. So it does populate. And I think you can still sort date of accident. So it's got all that same capability. It's just the typing. And that makes a big difference. And you only get 3. So if you want to really start to customize your data file, You're going to be stuck there. And it also leaves room for errors. So you have to be very, very careful when you enter the data because you're typing it in. So it's time consuming and, and you have to do that. So it depends on how much you need to use these custom fields. So I hope that kind of clears it up to explain how custom fields work. I'm probably going to go through some of the other, some of the other features in QuickBooks Online Advanced to help introduce them to everybody because I think it's really powerful. And I think we need to get the word out there of the things that it does do. Because it's more and more things are coming and there's a lot of things in that product that will save you time. So yes, it costs more. If you have a ProAdvisor membership, you can get it for $105 a month, which isn't bad since I think Plus is now up to $35. So it is a difference in price, but you have all that, everything's unlimited. And I can honestly tell you that more and more things are going to be coming there. So it's worth taking a look at. Just with the pool guy alone that I have with the new workflow with accelerated invoicing, it's just made it so much less back and forth. It saved me a lot of hours with my bookkeeper doing it with making memorized or recurring transactions. She's now— the workflow, it's not just so much the time, but it was the workflow and the errors that were coming with, did you change the amount? This is just a better way. If you have a customer that sells the same thing to multiple customers, take a look at it. It is worth that amount of money to save the headache of mistakes and to really get that feature in and start to use it where it's a better workflow. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful week and I'll see you back next week. Bye now.