Upgrading to QuickBooks Premier Account 2011 caused some errors with my existing forms and form templates.
Earlier this week I had to bite the bullet and upgrade my own QuickBooks file, moving it from the 2008 Premier Accountant version to the 2011 Premier Accountant Edition; as part of our own move from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Yes, folks just like many of you we have been moving software and multitudes of data from XP machines to Windows 7 and updating our QuickBooks company data file. Not a fun task, but a necessary one.
Upgrading our QuickBooks file was an easy task, we have a rather large QuickBooks file and the time it took to do the actual update seemed to be much faster than with previous upgrades. Our file seemed to be in good shape after the update, numbers on my reports matched, nothing missing – so I’m thinking yeah, this was easy!
All seemed to be good — until I had to go look at a Customer Invoice and then the fun and errors began. We kept getting these odd, and very unhelpful, “Template Error” messages, but could view the invoice without a problem on our screens.
Now, I had seen posts on other forums and groups that I belong to, where people were having trouble importing a customized template from an older version of QuickBooks to the 2011 version, but this wasn’t what I was trying to do.
I just figured that for whatever reason our invoice templates didn’t upgrade correctly. A couple of rebuilds later, still no luck. Next I created a portable company file and then opened that portable file – still no luck. Next, I decided to start from scratch, chose one of the QuickBooks standard templates, made a copy of it, and set about to customize it – now bear in mind, I did little to customize it, mainly removed the print ability of some columns and changed some field headers. Still the same errors. By now I’m pretty darn frustrated, but decided to try one more thing — and that was to print the darn thing.
Trying to print the invoice, produced a much more helpful error message, it told me that I didn’t have an Arial W1 font installed on my computer. So now I turn to my trusty sidekick, Google, and do a search for an Arial W1 font. Come to find out, an Arial W1 font is a special font that you have to BUY! Uh, thanks — but NO THANKS!
So off I go to my Template, open it in the Layout Designer and begin to search for a section of my form that uses this font. Come to find out, in the Layout Designer, the form name (Invoice, Estimate, Purchase Order, Sales Order, etc.) if the field that used the Arial W1 font. A simple font change and a save solved the problem – but only after a couple of hours of frustration.
So, if you’ve recently upgrade to QuickBooks 2011 and are experiencing “Template Errors” or “Missing Arial W1 font” messages, it’s a quick fix.
- From the Edit menu, choose Templates
- Find the template(s) that you use all the time in your business. Select it, double-click to Edit.
- Click the Layout Designer button
- Find the form title (Invoice, Estimate, Purchase Order, etc.). Right click and choose Properties.
- Click the Font button, and change the font to something else, a standard Arial will do.
- Click the OK button 4 times.
- Try printing your form again.
I hope this article will save you from some of the frustration that I experienced or provide you with what is really a pretty simple fix, once you know what you need to fix!
There are many times that a contractor will want to create a budget, to capture the costs and markup, for a job that they are working on. There are several methods to do so, but the one that I like best is to create a custom Estimate that will track estimated costs (the budget) a planned mark-up and a fixed sales price to the customer. This method is available to contractors using QuickBooks Pro, Premier (any flavor), or Enterprise (any flavor).
To accomplish this we’ll start at the Lists menu -> Templates ->
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This will open a window displaying a list of all the available form templates within QuickBooks; scroll down until you find the Custom Estimate template – click on it to highlight it.
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Click the Templates button at the bottom and select Duplicate -> Estimate -> and click OK. Your list now contains a template named Copy of: Custom Estimate. Double-click on this template. This opens the Basic Customization window.
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Click the Manage Templates button, this opens the Manage Templates window. In the Template Name field, change the name FROM Copy of: Custom Estimate to something like Estimate with Budget and click the OK button.
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Back at the Basic Customization window, you can:
- Insert/Use your company logo on the Estimate form by clicking into the box just in front of the words “Use logo”, this activates the Select Logo button and you can browse to the location of your logo file on your computer.
- Select a Color Scheme - click the drop down menu and choose from: Black, Gray, Maroon, Green, Blue or Beige.
- Change Font For – Title, Company Name, Company Address, Labels, Data, Subtotals Label, or Totals Label; you can change the Font Style, Color, and Size.
- Company & Transaction Information – select by checking whether or not you with to display Company Name, Company Address, Fax Number, Phone Number, Email Address, or Web Site Address. Click the Update Information button to make sure that the items you have selected are available in the Company Information window.
- Additional Customization button – this is the button that we want to click on.
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Clicking the Additional Customization button displays a window with several tabs – Header, Columns, Footer, and Print. These tabs allow you to design an Estimate that will meet the needs of your company. Starting with the Header tab, you can choose whether you want to print the following items on the actual Estimate form or to simply display them on your Estimate form, you can also change the titles of all the options available. Standard options include: Title (form Title), Date, Estimate #, Name/Address (billing), Ship To, Project/Job, P.O. Number, Terms, Due Date, Rep, Account Number, FOB, Other, and any Custom Fields that you have created in the Customer and/or Job Record.
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When you have made your selections, click on the Columns tab. Here you want to make sure that the Item, Description, Quantity, Cost, Amount, Markup, and Total items are selected to display on your Screen; while the Description, Quantity, Amount and Total are selected to Print on the actual form. You can also change the title of these fields if you wish – for example, you can change the Markup title to Profit & Overhead.
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Click on the Footer tab. Here, you can choose to Print a Message, Subtotal, Sales Tax, Total, and Signature on the final form. You will not be able to choose to display on your form the Subtotal, Signature, or Plain Text items. When you are ready click the Layout Designer button.
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The Layout Designer allows you to arrange the elements that you have selected to appear on your printed Estimate form. In most instances clicking on an item will allow you to drag it to another location or resize it.
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When you have arranged everything to your satisfaction click the OK button twice, and close the Templates List window.
Using the New Estimate:
When you use the new Estimate form, you need to use it in a specific order – enter information in the Item, Quantity, Cost and the Markup/Profit & Overhead columns. Overhead & Profit can be entered as a fixed dollar amount or a percentage – if you use a percentage you MUST enter the % sign.
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When you enter the line items on your estimate in this way, QuickBooks automatically calculates the Total that you will be charging your customer using the following formula: Quantity (15) times Cost (125.00) = Est. Amount (1875.00) plus Profit & Overhead (33.3% or 624.375) equals Total (2499.38). You’ll also notice that QuickBooks will keep track of the totals of your Estimated Amount, your Profit & Overhead, and the Total that you will charge your customer.
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When you’ve entered all of the vendor bills for this job and have billed it off to your customer, you should run an Actual vs. Estimate Report to see how you did. Compare the numbers from the report to the totals of your Estimate to see where you need to adjust your Profit & Overhead. Keep in mind that any difference in cost will effect your total Profit & Overhead.
Let’s assume that you had a small job, you estimated costs at $2375.00 added a total Profit & Overhead of $749.38 for a total contract of $3124.38.
When all bills were entered your actual cost was $2500.00 or $125.00 more than you Estimated; this means that your Profit on the Job is really $624.38 ($749.38 Estimated Profit & Overhead MINUS $125.00).
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Having access to this information is vital to your bidding process.
As a business owner there can be several different situations that you encounter where you might need to include a long legal disclaimer or explanation when you sell a specific item, offer special discounts, provide warranty disclaimers and information or explain your payment requirements when bidding on a job or even invoicing a customer.
There are four different methods for addressing this issue; the one that you choose will depend on what makes the most sense for your business:
- Items
- Template
- Letters Function
- Outside of QuickBooks
- Using Items to add long disclaimers – If the additional information needs to be included when a specific product is sold, that information can be included in the description OR you can create a new item with a zero sales cost for the purpose of adding the information to a Purchase Order, an Estimate, or an Invoice. The advantage of creating a separate item is that you can place the disclaimer item where you would like it on the form; right after the item it relates to, or at the bottom of an Estimate form. Later, you can delete it for billing purposes – as long as both you and your customer have a copy of the Estimate that contains the detailed information.
- Modifying the Form Template to include long disclaimers – If the disclaimer is long and you have the same disclaimer for every Estimate you create, for example your billing terms, and would like to make it a standard part of your form, using the Long Text Disclaimer section on the template itself may be the best solution. Choose Lists -> Templates -> select form -> Edit. The text can be entered and then the font size and placement can be adjusted using the Layout Designer.
- Using the QuickBooks Letters function – If the disclaimer is exceedingly long, after you create the form create an accompanying Letter in QuickBooks. Access the Letters function from the Customer Center by clicking on the Word option. Use this method with option with option 1 or 2 above to indicate that additional information is included on a separate page.
- Outside of QuickBooks – Depending on what needs to be included, it might make more sense to print the disclaimer on the back of the form. It would also be possible to use this method in conjunction with option 1 or 2 to state something along the lines of “see additional disclaimer information on the back of this form” to include a reference to the information without having to actually include it on the form.
