Setting up for Invoices
Contents
Overview
In these final steps of getting ready to transfer invoices from Morning Flight into QuickBooks we're mainly setting preferences. Do you want to keep product descriptions in the QuickBooks invoice short or spell them out? Price prepress and postpress separately or include them with the product? Naturally, including the Country Name in the customer's address is redundant if your sales are all in-country. Invoice Range? Just a default. You can override any preference during each export.
Setting Preferences - Tab1
Open the Flight Engineer (F-11), then go to QuickBooks > My Export Preferences. The first tab is self-explanatory, but does deserve a few illustrations:
1.Description. You'll find examples of minimal, standard, and verbose product descriptions below. If you use QuickBooks invoices primarily for bookkeeping and Morning Flight invoices to mail to your customers, go minimal. In QuickBooks, every unique description turns into an item and clogs up your files. That's unwieldy even for tracking nuts and bolts in a hardware store, but there at least it makes sense. In a print shop, none of the multiple versions QuickBooks creates for even simple products will ever serve a purpose.
Itemizing prepress and postpress charges is another matter. If you use Class tracking in QuickBooks, you'll need to itemize. If you don't track but would like to, go to Edit > Preferences on the QuickBooks main menu, then click Company Preferences > Accounting and check "Use class tracking."
2.Invoice Range. Use it to narrow or widen the range of invoices you'll see and can select in the pick list. Set the default to fit your invoicing schedule. If you generally bill at the end of each day, there's no point wading through a month's worth of invoices. "This Week-to-Date" would be a safe choice. Now and again you'll want to click on "Last Month-to-Date" to see if you missed anything.
Setting Preferences - Tab 2
1.File Name and Folder. Based on the sample entries you see in the "Settings" tab, your invoices will be exported into an empty C:\MFlight\INVOICES.CSV by default. Use any drive\folder\file combination for the file that's convenient, but limit the path to no more than one sub folder. For instance, C:\Users\Joe. Create the folder ahead of time, then remember what you named it. The CSV file will be purged before each export.
2.Invoice Template. If you mail or email QuickBooks invoices to your customers, enter the name of the template you're using.
3.Memo Text. Morning Flight and QuickBooks both auto-generate invoice numbers, and neither program cares what that number is, or whether somebody might have changed it. That's because both track invoices internally with different numbers, not the numbers displayed on the invoice. As you would expect, the displayed numbers are bound to vary between the two programs. The only function of the memo text label is to identify 1032 as the Morning Flight invoice matching the QuickBooks invoice in front of you. The customer will never see it.
You could, if you wanted to, try to keep the QuickBooks number in sync with the Morning Flight number, but trust me, you'd be herding cats. Besides, if you changed the QuickBooks number and imported the same invoice again later, the Pro 5 Importer might think it's a different invoice and create a duplicate when it should be updating. Best to leave well enough alone and look for matching Morning Flight invoices in the memo field.
4.Taxable Code and Non-Taxable Code. Both taxable and non-taxable codes in Morning Flight have to match the codes you're using in QuickBooks. The defaults are "Tax" and "Non" in both QuickBooks and Morning Flight.
Sales Tax Codes represent one of two tax related entities that must be identical in both Morning Flight and QuickBooks for the invoice transfer to work. The other entity is Sales Tax Items. In a nutshell, Tax Codes decide whether or not to charge sales tax, Sales Tax Items determine how much. If your original Morning Flight invoice includes sales tax but the generated QuickBooks invoice does not (or applies a different rate), check here first. Make sure your Sales Tax Items and Sales Tax Codes are a matched set in both programs.
Setting Preferences - Tab 3 and 4
Entries made here will change the wording but not the meaning of item codes. Call it what you will, offset will still be classified as offset, and merchandise as merchandise. The reason for allowing edits is to enable translations. The only item codes you could conceivably rename in English and not change what they represent are prepress and postpress on tab 4.
Matching Payment Terms
Morning Flight uses one set of payment options, QuickBooks another. There's nothing you need to do here. The Pro 5 Importer will automatically bring in new payment terms and add them to the QuickBooks list if they're not there already.
Synchronizing Shipping Options
Shipping options, too, are automatically imported when they're on a Morning Flight invoice but not found in QuickBooks. Here you should probably maintain uniformity. If an option says "FedEx" in one program and "Federal Express" in the other, settle on one name in both programs. It's easy enough. In Morning Flight, go to File > Update Shipping on the Main Menu. In QuickBooks, go to Lists > Customer & Vendor Profile Lists > Ship Via List. Add or edit a method by clicking "Shipping Method."
Transferring Invoices into QuickBooks