How to Manage Your Customer List in QuickBooks Online

Your customer list in QuickBooks Online isn't something you set up once and forget about. It needs to be managed just like your books do, and how you manage it directly affects the accuracy of your reports. In this video, I'm walking through everything that goes into keeping your customer list clean and accurate in QuickBooks Online. That starts with keeping contact information current, so your invoices and communications are always reaching the right person. From there, I cover when it makes sense to mark a customer as inactive, when you should merge duplicate customers instead, and why those two actions do very different things to your data. Marking a customer inactive is fully reversible and simply removes them from your active list. Merging permanently combines two customer records, including all of their transaction history, and it cannot be undone. Getting that distinction wrong can quietly distort reports like your profit and loss by customer. I'll also touch briefly on sub-customers, which come in handy if you're billing multiple locations or entities under one client relationship, along with why QuickBooks Online doesn't actually let you delete a customer at all. If you've been putting off a good look at your customer list, this one will walk you through exactly what to do with it.