Printing Serial Numbers in Invoices with QuickBooks Advanced Inventory
Intuit added the ability to manage serial numbers in QuickBooks Enterprise V12 with the Advanced Inventory option, and I’ve had a couple of clients point out a “bug” that was frustrating them relating to editing of sales forms and this feature. Turns out it isn’t a bug, just an odd way to implement this feature. Let me show you how this works so that you can explain it to someone who complains that this isn’t working.
If you are managing items with the Serial Number feature, you most likely will want to include the serial numbers in the invoice. This lets you identify which serialized items you are selling. It is simple to add, just edit the order template to add the Serial Number column to the screen.
This adds the serial number to the screen so that you can select the serial numbers to sell. In this example I allowed QuickBooks to Autofill from Existing Inventory, and then I opened the Quick View to see which serial numbers were chosen.
However, this doesn’t show the serial numbers in the printed invoice that the customer would receive. That should be simple to add as a column on the printed form, right? I can just edit the form the same way and add that column to the printed form. But wait – I do that, just like I would with any OTHER column, but the serial number column doesn’t appear?
Dang it, a bug in QuickBooks! Why can’t I get that column to show on the printed form?
Well, actually, it is working the way that Intuit intended. If you enable the field on the printed form it doesn’t actually add the column. Instead, you are telling QuickBooks that you want to include the serial number information, and QuickBooks will add the serial numbers to the description column.
Intuit thought that trying to crowd all of this information into a separate column would make things too difficult to read. Normally the description column is one of the widest, and it always “word wraps” to allow you to enter as long a description as you would like (up to 4096 characters). This seems to “fit” better. The checkbox in the form editor is the way that you tell QuickBooks to include this information.
This works for me. I agree that in many cases a separate serial number column just won’t work well (although if you are selling single items in a line an option for a column would be nice). Intuit used this approach to allow the serial number information to be selected for the print form because the mechanism for including/excluding was already built in, so they didn’t have to come up with a totally new option mechanism for individual form templates. I just wish that there had been some way to tell us that this particular box for this particular feature works differently than all other boxes for features in the form. Another factor in my confusion was that the column does show on the screen version of the form.
So I was confused. They used an existing mechanism to fit in this feature, they used it in a different way than it is used anywhere else, and they didn’t provide any sort of help to explain it. But, it does accomplish what you want, as long as you understand what is going on.
Keep in mind that you must include a description column for the serial numbers to show. No description on the printed form, no serial numbers.
My thanks to Catherine Fisse of Intuit for explaining this to me.
Category: QuickBooks Tips/Tricks, Working with QuickBooks
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He's been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70's, and remembers releasing his first commercial accounting software product when you had a one-floppy disk drive system, loading the program from one floppy and then replacing that with the other floppy to hold the data. He has a special interest in inventory and manufacturing software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor with additional certifications for QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Enterprise. He also is a Xero Certified Partner. Visit his CCRSoftware web site for information about his QuickBooks add-on products. Charlie can be reached at charlie.russell@sleeter.com He is also the author of the California Wildflower Hikes blog and a regular blog contributor to the Intuit Inner Circle. Connect with Charlie at GoogleSubscribe
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Great article regarding the unique way Intuit interprets ‘column’ on a printed form..(in this one case)..but really you would think a bunch of programmers would know the difference between a ‘column’ and a ‘field’ with rows that word wrap?
Seems like they could have inserted an ‘about’ link next to the print check-box to at least alert the User as to this difference over every other ‘print’ field on every form, so Users don’t just hunt and hunt for the ‘hidden column’ in Designer.
Murph
I think that they were looking for a simple way to get this in there without making a redesign of the entire window, which creates some other issues. Hopefully it is something that they can clean up in the future.
Lot Numbers print in a column on the invoice. Doesn’t seem like it would have been difficult to do the same with serial numbers. My guess, Intuit was trying to avoid pages of invoices if/when, say, 20 or more serial numbers were sold on one invoice.
As I said in the very beginning, this is a “lite” treatment of serial numbers. They were concerned about the situation where you are selling 20 items (for example) in one line, with 20 serial numbers. In a column, that could take too much space. So they push it into the description column which is usually the widest column.