The new QuickBooks online has completely revamped the experience for your Customers and Vendors pages. We heard that you wanted a consistent experience that made it easy to find the customer/vendor you are looking for and take the appropriate next action. The new design features powerful filtering, one click actions, and a single click to dive deeper into your customer/vendor. Let’s take a look at some of the features.

Improved scannability, more visible data without clicks

In our previous customer center you were not able to scan through the list and see your customer’s address or phone number. In order to see such details you were forced to click each customer individually and we received much feedback about this. In the new version, as you can see from the images above, you no longer need to click on each customer to see some of their key details like the address. Scannability of the list has improved significantly with our new design.

Quickly Send Emails

Some of our users expressed the need to quickly contact a customer or vendor via email, but they wanted to use their own native email client. Now you can do this quickly by clicking on the email icon located next to the name. The email icon indicates there is an email, if no email exists you will need to click on the name and edit the profile to add an email.

Tip: If you want to use Gmail as your default mail client in Chrome or Firefox, checkout the instructions mentioned here. Once you do this, any mailto: links that you click (like the small envelopes in the picture above), it will automatically open in Gmail instead of Outlook.

Easy filtering and searching

We introduced the concept of a Money Bar on the income list in our previous version and you loved it. Now the same easy filtering can applied to your customers and vendors. Need to find all your customers with overdue invoices? One click. Need to find all your vendors with open bills? One click. Need to see who you recently paid? One click.

Once you are in a filtered state you can click the same filter again to remove it or click the blue Clear Filter / View All link on the top left.

If you already know the name of your customer or vendor you can always use the search as well. Search is supported for name as well as address. We have heard feedback on expanding the search to include phone number and company name, we are hoping to get this into the product in the future.

Actionable

Being able to filter your customers and vendors wouldn’t accomplish much if we didn’t make it easy to take some action. Once again we’ve take the same great action buttons you loved from our income list and expanded the capabilities for your customers and vendors. You’ll notice each row has a drop down button on the far right that allows you to either take that action on the row or select a different action. Let’s review some of the actions possible –

Estimates and Unbilled Activity (Customers) / Purchase Order (Vendors)

Filter by estimates or unbilled activity to see all your customers with non-posting transactions. From here your next action will be to start an invoice. Once you click Start invoice for a particular customer the invoice page will pop open with that customer pre-selected. You will also see the available estimates or unbilled activity for that customer in the right hand drawer. Simply pick the items you want and add them from the drawer by clicking Add.

Similarly on the vendors side, you will create a bill for a particular vendor with a purchase order. Once you click Create bill, the bill page will pop open with that vendor pre-selected and then you can choose the purchase order(s) to add from the right hand drawer.

Note: You must be in the Plus SKU for purchase orders to be available as a filter in your vendor center.

Open and Overdue Invoices / Open and Overdue Bills

Never lose invoices or bills for customers again. Applying this filter will show you everyone with open or overdue transactions. For customers you have the ability to send reminders for all invoices, send/print statements (customer must have an email to be able to send statements), or receive a payment for an invoice. On the vendor side you can make a bill payment against any open or overdue bill.

Paid

This bucket will show you all the customers or vendor payments in the last 30 days. From here there aren’t any direct actions on the transaction, but you can make any new transaction for the customer or vendor.

A new way to create statements

Previously to create statements you had to pick criteria out of a dialog to get a list of customers. This ability still exists in our global create (the + button on the top), but we have introduced a customers first based approach to statements. Here is how it is works –

1. Filter your customers by open or overdue invoices.
2. Use the checkbox to select one or multiple customers.
3. Use the batch action to print or send statements to those customers.

Easily Pay Bills

Previously paying a bill for a vendor was an entirely different screen. There was lots of feedback around a better way to do this, and we think the new vendor center gives you just that. Simply filter by your overdue or open bills and use the Make Payment next action.

Dive Deeper

The main view on your customer and vendor center gives you a great overview and the ability to take some high level actions. If you need to dive deeper for more information or need to take action on specific transactions, we’ve made it just as easy. The two ways to go about this are by clicking on the customer/vendor name or by clicking on the blue link in the row. Clicking on the link will take you into a pre-filtered view of your customers/vendors transactions.

Customer / Vendor Information and Editing

The main snapshot of data is available for quick viewing from the detail page along with an edit button to edit and update.

Create and view transactions

The grid you see here is the exact same grid located under transactions for Sales (Customers) and Expenses (Vendors). You can do the same actions, export, print, and create new transactions for your customer. What’s different is that you can see every single transaction created for your customer along with some new canned filters available to you in the drop down. We heard you want to easily see all the money received, so you will find a new filter at the bottom of the filter list for Money Received.

Customizing the grid

As mentioned above, we are using a similar grid across the product to give a consistent user experience for all our list pages – Customers, Vendors, Sales, Expenses etc. On the top right of each grid, there exists a settings / gear icon that you can use to customize which columns to show or which to hide or how many rows to show. Next to the gear icon you will also see a print and export icon to print this list or export to a spreadsheet respectively.

On the transaction grid below you will notice a new checkbox at the very bottom labeled compact. We heard a ton of feedback that users wanted the ability to see more rows on transaction grids, so now all sales and expense grids give you the ability to make them compact. This feature will be released towards the end of December in our next release.

Feedback

As always please vote on suggestions or put your ideas in our user voice. We have heard your feedback around using Company Name over Customer Name in the customer center and are looking into how to make adjustments there. We have also heard your issues around going from customer to customer on the detail page and are investigating ways to make that easier as well.

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