QuickBooks Desktop 2021 - Customize Payment Receipts

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Intuit recently released QuickBooks 2021 Desktop. Insightful Accountant has been evaluating various pre-release versions of these products for months and has spent hours communicating with Intuit personnel, including product managers and developers, so we can help you learn about the new products. This article is one in a series of individual product features intended to provide additional content to that within our QuickBooks Desktop 2021 product synopsis.

Customized Payment Receipts

Probably one of the features that QuickBooks Users have awaited the longest of any of those delivered in 2021 is ‘Customize Payments Receipts.’ When it comes to standardized custom forms within QuickBooks Desktop ‘Payment Receipts’ have always been the ‘oddball’. QuickBooks users weren’t able to edit payment receipts to add their Company log or include appropriate fields as they could with the rest of QuickBooks forms (invoices, purchase orders, etc.).

The standard payment receipts were limited in the data they provided, without much of the information customers or business owners needed, and no way to elaborate on customer payments. And because there was only a single payment receipt format, there was no way to configure templates for different payment receipt purposes or set a default template for the most common day-to-day uses.

But for 2021, QuickBooks Desktop offers Customized Payment Receipts that allow business owners to have a consistent, professional look for all of their business communications to customers including payment receipts that conform to their other standardized QuickBooks forms.

Customizing Your Payment Receipts

Easily customize their payment receipts in essentially the same way they customize other QuickBooks standard forms (like invoices and purchase orders) reducing the time to learn form-customization. To access Payment Receipt customization, from the QuickBooks Menu bar select Customers, then choose Receive Payments, then select the Formatting tab on the ribbon toolbar, and then choose Customize Data Layout.

The first time you go through this process you will be shown a screen that looks like the one seen below and asking if you wish to customize your standard payment receipt template. Click on the Customize template button.

You will be shown the template Basic Customization window, with the Intuit Standard Payment Receipt displayed. Click on Manage Templates.

When the Locked Template Advisory (box) displays select Make a Copy to create a copy of the Intuit Standard Payment Template. Rename the copied template from the Preview section of the window by editing the name of the template in Template Name (as shown in in the red box below).

Make any basic customizations you wish:

  • In the Logo & Fonts section check the Use Logo checkbox and then click on Select Logo. Navigate to the location of your logo image file and select it to be included in your new payment receipt template.
  • Click on the Select Color Scheme drop-down to select a color and then click Apply Color Scheme to your new payment receipt template.
  • You can select any field you wish to change the font for by clicking on a field within the Change Font For scroll-box and then clicking on Change Font to change the font or data fields on your new payment receipt template.
  • In the Company & Transaction Information section, you can select any of the available fields you want to include on your payment receipt.

These changes will be displayed in the Preview section of the Basic Customization window. When you are done with your changes select OK to apply your basic customizations to your new payment receipt template.

Additional Customization of Your Payment Receipt(s)

You can customize your new payment receipt in the same way you customize your other QuickBooks templates using the Additional Customization button at the bottom of the Basic Customization window.

In the Additional Customization window, you can see the Header, Columns, and Footer tabs. Remove or add information to the header, columns, and footer depending on how you want your payment receipt to look when you print or email it to your customers. You can also rename any of these information fields if these fields should be shown on your payment receipt with different nomenclature.

You can see these changes being applied to your payment receipt template from the Preview section of the Additional Customization window. When you are done with the changes select OK to finalize the additional customization changes to your payment receipt template.

Customizing the Layout Design of Your Payment Receipt(s)

As with other QuickBooks templates you may also wish to change the ‘layout’ of the template itself, by clicking on the Layout Designer button at the bottom of the Basic Customization window. QuickBooks opens a special window giving you the full layout design capabilities.

The Layout Designer window lets you drag and drop or resize the various data/information fields shown on your payment receipt template. These changes are applied to your payment receipt template in the Layout Designer window as you perform them.

When you are done with your layout design changes, select OK to apply the changes to your payment receipt template.

QuickBooks returns you to the Basic Customization window, if you wish you can preview your form by clicking on the Print Preview button to get a completed view of your new template.

Configuring Multiple Templates, Setting & Overriding a Default Payment Receipt

You can configure multiple payment receipt templates for different purposes. You can configure as many different payment receipt templates as you wish just so long as each one is uniquely named.

You can also set a default payment receipt template for most day-to-day uses. This template will be applicable for your payment receipt when you print or email a payment receipt as an attachment from the Customer Payment screen.

To set the default payment receipt you must be logged in as the QuickBooks Administrator:

  • Select Edit from the Menu bar in QuickBooks
  • Select Preferences
  • Select Payments and select Company Preferences
  • Under the Receive Payments section, you will see Set a payment receipt template for email/print
  • Select the drop-down to set a template for your payment receipt and mark it as your default payment receipt template

The default template can be easily overridden to select an alternate template in the customer payments screen when needed. To override the default template on a particular payment receipt simply select the template drop-down option from the Formatting tab of your Customer Payment screen.

Once you are done with this specific payment transaction your template will automatically revert to the default option you have selected.

I for one am very happy to see this feature finally arriving to QuickBooks 2021, it has been a long time coming, but has also been needed by many.  Finally, users have a way to make their 'payment receipts' conform to the same basic appearance as their other QuickBooks forms.

Feature Availability: At the time of initial release Customize Payment Receipts will be available in QuickBooks Pro and Premier, QuickBooks Accountant, QuickBooks ProPlus, QuickBooks PremierPlus, and QuickBooks Enterprise (all subscription levels).  The Customize Payment Receipts feature is scheduled for release within the United States, Canadian, and United Kingdom country versions of QuickBooks Desktop, release times may vary between countries.

You will find our summary of QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Enterprise for 2021 along with other related features in the 'Related Links' at the bottom of this feature.

Editor's Acknowledgements

Special thanks go out to my good friend Laura Madeira who allowed me to cross-check my articles with advance copies of her features to make certain that we were consistent in providing accurate information regarding the 2021 release. Laura, and her co-author Karen Siewert, have written three separate articles this year covering different aspects of the QuickBooks 2021 release, please be certain to check them out at Intuit's Firm of the Future blog:

I also want to thank the following Intuit personnel for their dedication in providing information, numerous briefings, and responding to my questions, as well as in guiding the actual product developments within QuickBooks Desktop and this release: Rachna Arya, Nipun Bhatia, Aditya Dixit, Sowmya Murthy, Madhumita Tayade, Muthuraj Thangavel, Tulasi Vijay Kumar Thulluru, and Raman Verma. I also want to say thanks to Michelle Berg, Mindy King, and Shawn Sturgeon from Intuit for additional product briefings and information along with the various members of Intuit's Alpha & Beta Product Testing Teams for QuickBooks 2021.

Of course, there are entire teams, composed of hundreds of Intuit personnel behind all of these people that make the magic happen and we so often forget to say, thank you, to them, so to all involved, “Thank You for Another Great Product"!

Note: Some images used in this feature may have been provided, or conceptualized initially by Intuit. In some instances they are displayed directly as provided by Intuit, in other cases they may have been modified from the source material(s) Intuit provided.