Names in Quickbooks

Quickbooks runs on lists. There is a list for Vendor names, a list for Employee names, and a list for Customer names. Quickbooks won’t let you enter the same name in the same way on 2 different lists. You may be the owner and are an Employee on the payroll. You may need to repay yourself for items you purchase for the company with your personal funds. So you need to set yourself up as an Employee and a Vendor. The first field you see when you enter a name is like a tab on a cardboard file folder. You can put anything there that will help you remember what is in that file. There is a secondary field where you can put the official name of the company or person.

An example would be The Container Store. On that first tab, you might enter Container and then for the official name you would enter The Container Store. This way when you are looking for the vendor, your mind may only think of ‘Container’ and you’ll see that on the tab you can choose. If you need to print out a check for them, it will print out as The Container Store, which is proper.

That being said, let’s go back to the situation in the first paragraph where you have the same person as an Employee and a Vendor. You cannot enter John Smith in the first field of the Employee section and the Vendor section, too. You’ll get an error message. Here’s how to get around that. Enter one of the names as you normally would, John Smith, in the Employee section. When you enter the same name in the Vendor section, do it this way, John Smith (2). That first field is the only place this matters. Everything else in the section can be the same. The actual name of the person, their address, their phone number, etc. If you needed to set the same person up as a Customer, you would use John Smith (3). The number behind the name will not be shown on their check or invoice or on reports.

Of course, when you use which name matters. You only use the Employee name for actual payroll checks. No other type of payments. If you need to reimburse an employee for something, you must set them up as a Vendor and pay them back under that Vendor name. Keep in mind that Contractors are always set up as Vendors, not Employees. If you have been paying a Contractor for a while and later decide to hire them as an actual Employee, then you need to create an Employee name before you run their first paycheck. You cannot run payroll under the Vendor name. This is because payroll taxes are applied to Employees, but not to Contractors/Vendors.

There is also an Other Names List and this one is special. You will use it only when the name you want to add does not fit into any other name list. For instance, I would put the owners name on it so that I can enter a draw under that name and not Employee, Vendor or Customer. Be sure you don’t accidentally add your names in the Other Names List when you meant to use another name list.

Here’s another scenario; I get 2 bills from Comcast and 1 is for the telephone and 1 is for the internet service. The mailing addresses where you send your payments to are different. I need 2 Vendors to be set up so that I can keep these 2 bills separate and so that the checks are snail-mailed to the right addresses. One address is in Pennsylvania and one is in California. So I set up Comcast PA for the one in Pennsylvania and Comcast CA for the one in California. All I have to do is glance at the address on the bill to know which Comcast tab I need to enter it to.