Sales Register

A sales register lists every invoice, sales receipt and credit memo in a period, one row each, in your own template. Use it for a VAT or GST return, a sales tax review, or anything your accountant asks for as "every sale in the quarter".

Opening it

Go to Connections, open your QuickBooks company, and click Sales Registers.

Choosing what goes on it

• Period: Last month, Last quarter, This month, or Custom to pick your own dates.
• Include: tick Invoices, Sales receipts and Credit memos as you need. At least one stays ticked.
• Template: choose the template to fill. Templates made for registers are listed first.
• Format: CSV, Word or PDF. A CSV template always makes a CSV file.

Some templates are written for one kind of document, like a schedule of credit notes. Choosing one ticks the kinds it needs and locks the boxes, with a note saying which.

Rows and totals

Each document is one row, in date order, then by number.

Credit memos are negative, so they come off the totals. The register's totals are the subtotal, tax and total of everything on it.

If you bill in more than one currency, amounts are converted to your home currency at each document's own exchange rate. ${LINE_CURRENCY} prints the document's own currency, and ${LINE_DOCUMENT_TOTAL} its total as printed on it.

See Placeholders for every placeholder a register can use, including your custom fields on sales and on customers.

Check before you download

Under What this period holds you see the number of documents, the subtotal, the tax and the total. Anything worth fixing in QuickBooks first is listed with examples:

• documents with no number;
• numbers used more than once;
• documents in another currency;
• rows where a column your template prints is blank, like a customer with no tax ID.

Under the settings, you're also warned about:

• a placeholder your QuickBooks company can't fill, like a custom field you haven't created;
• a value the template's file name uses that isn't set, like your company tax ID.

Fix what you can in QuickBooks, then choose the period again to see the new numbers.

Preview and generate

Click Preview to see the register filled in, or Generate to download it.

Large registers are faster as CSV. A Word or PDF register with hundreds of rows takes longer to build.

Opening a CSV in Excel

Excel hides trailing zeros when it opens a CSV, so 290.40 shows as 290.4. The file itself still says 290.40.

If you're uploading the file somewhere, such as a tax portal, upload it as you downloaded it. Saving it again in Excel writes what Excel shows.

Scheduling it

On the Advanced plan, click Schedule this register to have it made every month or every quarter. See Scheduled Runs.

Starting from a template

The Sales Register starter is a CSV with these columns:

• Date
• Type
• Number
• Customer
• Customer tax ID
• Memo
• Subtotal
• Tax
• Total

It ends with a totals row. Download it from the sales register page, change the columns in Excel, and upload it as a template. See CSV templates.