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This week we’re taking a break from QuickBooks Online. A number of you have expressed less interest in the online version than in the desktop version of QuickBooks. Accordingly, this blog post is about QuickBooks desktop.

We still want to finish our series on QuickBooks Online. It is good to have an overview of what online accounting programs will do for you. They are growing tremendously. So, as a compromise, we’ll alternate between both QBO and desktop for the next few weeks until out QBO series is complete.

Forms like invoices can be customized in QuickBooks to a much greater degree than many people realize. There are many options to creating forms that will make your business look unique in a world of standard QuickBooks forms.

The customization option we want to look at today is adding a logo to an invoice or other forms. A logo can be added to invoices, sales orders, credit memos, purchase orders, reminder statements, estimates, and sales orders.

In order to accomplish this, you need to have a digital copy of your company logo. This can be a digital photo, a scanned in copy, almost any copy of your logo that is saved on your computer.

When customizing forms in QuickBooks we are working with templates. There is a list of templates available at Lists->Templates. This list will show all the saved templates in your company file. You can edit some of them. Some, the defaults that come with QuickBooks, can be easily copied and then edited.

Another way to edit an existing template is to open it. Then, from the format tab of the ribbon, select Customize Data Layout.

After either selecting a template from the list and choosing edit, or clicking the customize icon from the form itself, a screen opens with many options. Along the bottom of the screen are several buttons. One is labeled Basic Customization. Choose this button.

You can see in the screenshot the checkbox that tells QuickBooks you want to use a logo. Once that is selected, click the Select Logo button to navigate to the location on your computer where the graphic file of the logo exists.

Once the logo is selected, QuickBooks copies it into the folder where the company file resides. The name of the graphic file now shows next to the Use logo checkbox.

QuickBooks has also placed the logo on the invoice template. You can see that in the Preview panel where the arrow is pointing.

We may not be happy with the placement. To change that, we would click on the Layout Designer button.

In Layout Designer we can drag text and data boxes to the locations we desire. We can also change fonts, sizes, colors, etc. to control how the information on our form appears.

In the end, we can create something that looks more like this:

How about you? Have you added a logo to your invoice template? Any tips for someone who hasn’t done this before?