Adding, Inactivating, Editing, and Merging

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About this lesson

Let's explore how to add, edit, merge, and inactivate accounts within the products and services list.

Quick reference

Adding, inactivating, editing and merging

The products and services list is the list of products and services you sell your clients.

When to use

As your business grows and evolves, you may change the products and services you sell. This module will show you how to edit this list to fit your needs.

Instructions

Getting to the products and services list:

  • Click on the big gear in the upper right hand corner
  • Under the column called lists, click on products and services

Default columns:

NOTE: some of these are only available to subscribers of Plus or Advanced editions of QuickBooks Online. The sample file we're using for the demo is the Plus edition.

  • Name
  • SKU
  • Type
  • Sales description
  • Sales price
  • Cost
  • Taxable
  • Quantity on hand
  • Reorder point
  • Action

Optional Columns found in the little gear:

  • Income account
  • Expense account
  • Inventory account
  • Purchase description
  • Quantity on PO

Actions you can take for each product/service:

  • Edit
  • Make inactive
  • Run report
  • Duplicate
  • Merge

Merging a product/service:

  • Find the product/service name you wish to keep, copy this name
  • Find the products/service name you wish to merge with the other
    • Click the blue hyperlink on the right that says edit
    • Paste the name you previously copied into the name field
    • Click save and close 

Adding a new product/service:

  • Click on the green gear in the upper right hand corner
  • Choose the type of product/service you're adding 
    • Add a name for this product/service
    • Add a default description for this product/service
    • Assign an income account 
    • Use the dropdown to indicate if this product/service is generally subject to sales tax or not

Hints & tips

  • A common frustration I see is that income is being posted to the wrong account on the chart of accounts.  In many cases this happens because the wrong income account was picked during the set up of the product/service. To quickly see the income accounts you've chosen/assigned to product/service, click on the little gear on the right side, then select income account. Now you'll see the income account associated with all the products and services listed below.
  • You can expand or shrink the width of columns by clicking on the line between two columns and then dragging it left or right. 
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  • 00:04 In this video, I want to show you how to set up the Products and
  • 00:07 Services in your QuickBooks Online.
  • 00:09 The Products and Services is the list of things that you can put on an invoice, or
  • 00:13 a sales receipt.
  • 00:14 These said dear clients.
  • 00:16 In my example, I have a couple of things set up.
  • 00:18 But I want to take you back to the beginning and show you how I got here, and
  • 00:22 also show you how to add things.
  • 00:24 So let me take you to the dashboard.
  • 00:26 This is where you might start when you log into your QuickBooks.
  • 00:30 To get to the Products and
  • 00:31 Services list, you're going to click on the gear in the upper right-hand corner.
  • 00:35 You're going to go to the column that says List, and then down below to Products and
  • 00:40 Services.
  • 00:42 In our example, we're a race car driving school.
  • 00:45 So we offer things such as race, car driving, training and track rental, and
  • 00:49 so forth.
  • 00:50 A super secret list of what we offer is right here.
  • 00:54 I've added a couple of these things so you can see what it looks like.
  • 00:57 But I'm also going to go and add some new things, so
  • 00:59 you can see what it looks like to add new stuff.
  • 01:02 So right now, we have the 4 hour training, and we have the 2 hour training.
  • 01:06 We also need to add the 8 hour training.
  • 01:08 So let's go ahead and add the 8 hour training together.
  • 01:12 I'm going to go into my QuickBooks, and
  • 01:13 I'm going to click New in the upper right-hand corner.
  • 01:16 When I click New, I can see I have these various options to the right.
  • 01:21 If you're not using the plus or advanced edition, you would only see service and
  • 01:25 not inventory, and that's okay.
  • 01:28 So I'm going to pick Service.
  • 01:31 So I'm going to offer an 8 hour training course,
  • 01:34 and I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to say, I had a description.
  • 01:39 I liked my description.
  • 01:41 I forgot exactly what it said, so I'm going to leave it blank for now.
  • 01:44 I'm going to call it 1299.
  • 01:48 Over to the right, I get to pick the income account.
  • 01:51 And what this is really saying is whenever I sell this, I get to tell QuickBooks
  • 01:55 where to put the money, where to put the revenue on my profit and loss report.
  • 02:00 So in this case, I say you know what?
  • 02:02 This is training income, so I'd like it to go to the account called training.
  • 02:07 I'm going to choose Save and Close.
  • 02:09 I've now added 8 hour to my list.
  • 02:12 Now, I remember that I liked the description I had for 4 hours, so
  • 02:15 I'm going to click Edit for the 4 hour.
  • 02:18 I'm going to take this description and copy it.
  • 02:21 As a reminder, this is the description that will show up on the invoice or
  • 02:25 sales receipt that you generate for your clients.
  • 02:28 I'm going to click Edit here, and then just paste it.
  • 02:33 Right now, I have a 2 hour training course.
  • 02:35 And for the purpose of this video, I'm going to add a 1 hour course.
  • 02:39 Instead of retyping everything and going through new like I just did,
  • 02:44 I say you know what?
  • 02:45 I really like what I have in here, and I still want to modify it slightly and
  • 02:48 make a copy of it.
  • 02:49 I'm going to click on that drop down to the right of Edit.
  • 02:51 And then I'm going to click on Duplicate.
  • 02:56 So now it's just made me a nice little copy.
  • 02:58 So I'm going to change this from 2 hours to 1,
  • 03:00 I'm going to take the word copy off the end.
  • 03:03 I'm going to make this 299, and save and close.
  • 03:08 So I've shown you a couple of ways to add new things to your Products and
  • 03:12 Services list, and I've showed you how to edit.
  • 03:15 Now what I want to do is show you how to inactivate a service you're no
  • 03:18 longer offering.
  • 03:20 So we'll pretend that at one point we did offer the 1 hour training, but
  • 03:23 we don't anymore.
  • 03:25 So we want to take it out of the drop down list, just so
  • 03:27 we don't have to scroll past it.
  • 03:29 So let's go ahead and click on the arrow to the right of Edit, and
  • 03:32 we'll say make inactive.
  • 03:35 It says are you sure you want to inactivate it?
  • 03:36 And we say Yes.
  • 03:38 Inactivating it doesn't delete any of the history.
  • 03:42 It just turns that off, so that it's not available in the drop down list
  • 03:45 when we create an invoice, or a sales receipt.
  • 03:47 So I'm going to make one more.
  • 03:50 I'm going to make a second one called 8 hour training.
  • 03:54 I want to show you what sometimes will happen to people, and so
  • 03:57 I'm just going to duplicate to get us close.
  • 03:59 It says 8 hour training, copy.
  • 04:00 Everything else is the same.
  • 04:03 I want you to imagine a situation where maybe you typed in 8 hour training course,
  • 04:07 and then you typed in something else like 8 hour training.
  • 04:11 But you realized, my gosh, I have to have the same thing, and
  • 04:14 I don't need two, I just want them to be one.
  • 04:17 I want you to see how to merge them together.
  • 04:19 So right now, I have 8 hour training-copy, and
  • 04:22 I'd like to merge that with 8 hour training.
  • 04:25 I want it to show up one time on my list, and
  • 04:27 I want any invoices that had the first name to have the second name.
  • 04:32 So when you modify the name, it modifies the name of the invoice.
  • 04:35 And when you modify the the name, or merge it with another name,
  • 04:38 it'll make it consistent across the invoices you've already created.
  • 04:43 On the right-hand side, I'm going to click on the word Edit.
  • 04:46 I'm going to modify the name to be the name that I want it to be.
  • 04:51 So in this case,
  • 04:51 I just want 8 hour training without the word copy to the right.
  • 04:55 I'm going to select Save and Close.
  • 04:58 I get this little pop up that says would you like to merge your names?
  • 05:01 And I'm going to say Yes, and now it's merged.
  • 05:06 I'd like to show you how to add one more product and service type, because I
  • 05:11 want you to see what it looks like when there's different income accounts.
  • 05:14 So on the right-hand side, I'm going to click New.
  • 05:17 I'm going to say it's a service.
  • 05:19 I'm going to call it rent the track,
  • 05:24 so 30 minute track rental.
  • 05:28 I realized I forgot to put a time, so I put 30 minutes in the front of this.
  • 05:33 Go back to my cheat sheet.
  • 05:34 I've decided that you can rent the track for 9.99.
  • 05:38 All right, so over here for the income account, again, it defaults to sales, and
  • 05:43 I say that's not helpful.
  • 05:44 I really want to know once my business is up and going, what are my good sellers?
  • 05:49 And so I'm going to change this to say track rental income, and
  • 05:53 then I'm going to click Save and Close.
  • 05:56 And so now I have all these different kinds of training, and
  • 05:59 I have 30 minute rent the track.
  • 06:00 I can click on the word Name to sort it by name.
  • 06:03 I also want you to see one other thing that I think is kind of helpful.
  • 06:08 If you click this gear to the right, and
  • 06:11 if you say show me the income account column.
  • 06:14 going to make this a little bit bigger,
  • 06:15 you can kind of it like you would an Excel sheet.
  • 06:19 When I make this bigger, I can see at a glance like okay,
  • 06:22 this is training income, that's track rental income, etc.
  • 06:25 I can click on the text that says Income Account, and
  • 06:28 sort it by the income accounts.
  • 06:30 This becomes more useful once you start having sales, because then you can say,
  • 06:34 okay, I sold 30 minutes of track rental on my profit and loss.
  • 06:39 I'm going to see it as truck rental income.
  • 06:42 Everything should go where you want.
  • 06:43 But sometimes, you'll find that your profit loss has something going to like
  • 06:47 sales, or a generic term you didn't have in mind.
  • 06:50 If you modify this list to show you the income account,
  • 06:53 you'll be able to see at a glance if you have anything lined up incorrectly.
  • 06:58 All right, in the next episode, we're going to talk about how to run reports to
  • 07:02 kind of see what are your best sellers?
  • 07:04 What are you selling the most of?
  • 07:06 That sort of thing, so see you soon.

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