How to Customize Invoices in QuickBooks Online (So They Actually Work for Your Business)

If you’re sending invoices from QuickBooks Online and they feel cluttered, confusing, or not quite “you,” you’re not alone. Many small business owners use the default invoice settings and never realize how much flexibility they actually have.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to customize invoices in QuickBooks Online so they’re clear, professional, and aligned with how your business operates. This is the same process I demonstrate in the video, broken down step by step so you can follow along at your own pace.

Customizing your invoices isn’t about making them fancy, it’s about making them easier for your customers to understand and easier for you to get paid.

Why Invoice Customization Matters in QuickBooks Online

Your invoice is more than just a request for payment. It’s a communication tool.

When invoices are hard to read, missing key details, or overloaded with unnecessary information, it often leads to:

• Delayed payments
• Extra back-and-forth with clients
• Confusion about what was billed and why

QuickBooks Online gives you tools to control how your invoices look and what information they include. Once set up properly, your invoices can:

• Clearly show what you’re charging for
• Match your brand
• Reduce client questions
• Support faster, smoother payments

Where to Customize Invoices in QuickBooks Online

Invoice customization lives in Settings, not on the invoice itself.

To get there:

1. Click the ⚙️ Gear icon
2. Select Custom form styles
3. Choose an existing invoice style or create a new one

This is where you control how invoices, estimates, and sales receipts appear for your customers.

Choosing the Right Invoice Style

QuickBooks offers a few base styles (such as Standard, Modern, or Airy). These are just starting points.

You can:

• Duplicate a style and customize it
• Create different invoice styles for different purposes
• Use one invoice layout for services and another for products

This is especially helpful if you work with different types of clients or pricing structures.

Editing the Look and Layout of Your Invoice

Inside the invoice editor, you can adjust:

• Font style and size
• Colors and branding
• Logo placement
• Section spacing

The goal isn’t decoration, it’s readability. A clean, well-spaced invoice makes it easier for clients to scan and approve quickly.

Controlling What Information Appears on the Invoice

This is where customization really becomes useful.

You can choose whether to show or hide:

• Quantities and rates
• Due dates
• Payment terms
• Shipping information
• Custom fields

If your clients don’t need certain details, removing them can make invoices much easier to understand.

Customizing Product and Service Descriptions

Invoices are clearer when line items are descriptive.

You can:

• Edit product and service names
• Add meaningful descriptions
• Control how much detail appears on the invoice

This helps clients understand exactly what they’re being billed for and reduces follow-up questions.

Adding Messages and Payment Instructions

QuickBooks allows you to add:

• A default message at the top of the invoice
• A message at the bottom (often used for payment instructions or thank-yous)

Simple, friendly language here goes a long way. Clear payment instructions alone can significantly reduce delays.

Preview Before You Send

One of the most important steps is previewing your invoice before saving.

Always:

• Use the preview option
• Check how it looks from a customer’s perspective
• Confirm that totals, spacing, and wording make sense

What looks fine in the editor doesn’t always read the same way once sent.

A Quick Reminder About Consistency

Once your invoice style is set up properly, stick with it.

Consistent invoices:

• Look more professional
• Are easier for clients to recognize
• Make your bookkeeping more predictable

You can always tweak things later, but a solid base saves a lot of time.

Customizing invoices in QuickBooks Online is one of those small setup tasks that pays off over and over again. Clear invoices lead to fewer questions, faster payments, and less friction in your day-to-day bookkeeping.

If you haven’t reviewed your invoice settings in a while, it’s worth taking a few minutes to do so. It’s one of the simplest ways to improve both your client experience and your cash flow.

Helpful Resources

Compare QuickBooks Online plans

https://www.mycloudbookkeeping.org/quickbooks-plan-comparison

Download the free Month-End Checklist for Small Business

https://learn.mycloudbookkeeping.org/small-business-month-end-checklist

The default invoice in QuickBooks Online works, but there are a number of settings that affect what your customer sees and how invoices are handled after they’re sent.

In this video, I’ll walk through the invoice customization options step by step and show how each one affects the invoice itself, from layout and fields to reminders.

Screen capture

 So here we are in the sample company. Let's go straight up here to create invoice.

Now the first thing we see here is the Intuit Assist, the new AI that will assist you in preparing an invoice. You can upload text images files as you can see, and it will draft an invoice for you. I do have a different video walking through those steps. I'm gonna close down this panel. And, and let's add some information and then we'll customize it and see what happens.

So we'll make a very simple sale to cool cars. Um, let's just go with a rock fountain. I love selling rock fountains. One at $275. We'll take off the tax and then we'll grab a pump to go with this rock fountain for $15. And maybe we'll get a little bit of concrete or something as well. Let's have a look.

Uh, some concrete and, uh, concrete for fountain installation. Why don't we just put $5 on this one? So now we have created an invoice. Very basic. Here we go. Cool cars. We've got, um, our date, the terms, so when the due date is and some products. Let's save it and we can print or preview this.

So let's go to print to preview what this invoice looks like. And here it is. Looks totally fine. It's got a note to the customer. It's very plain and it's absolutely nothing wrong with it. But let's take a look and see what we can also do to it. We're going to pop up here to manage. First of all, we can see there's the status that it's been opened.

This is a really cool feature. If you're ever wondering if your client or your customer has looked at your invoice, if they've received it, this is fantastic. Sometimes you can send it and it doesn't go to the right address. But that's not what we're doing today. We're gonna have a look in here at our customization.

So we have the invoice number, the invoice date, the due date, and the terms. That completely makes sense. Now, we could also add a service date, and if we did, we might want to then say that on the, um, 12th of January we did some installation. Okay.

We're able to then show when services were carried out. Maybe that's useful. Maybe it's not. We could also select a SKU if we wanted to show the skew. Here we see our skew for our rock fountains skew for our pump. I don't think it's useful here, but if it's useful in your business, you have the option quantity rate and amount.

Now, maybe we don't need to see the quantity in the rate. We have one of everything. We could turn those off. Do you see? There we go, and we only have the amount. I'm gonna leave them in here. And we also have the ability to add some custom fields. So let's save this and manage our custom fields.

We're gonna add a custom field. Uh, to our invoice and we want it to show on the form, and let's just say it's our salesperson and we may want it to show on the invoice so they know who to contact. So let's pop it in here. We'll say it. Is a dropdown list and if we've got two salespeople, mine is Sally and one is Fred.

Oh, how un imaginative. But there we go. We have two there. We can add up to a hundred, but we've got two people we can add in as sales sales. Person. So we're gonna save this. Oh, I have to select a category. So this is whether it applies to a customer or a transaction. So we may want to say that every time we work with cool cars, we want the salesperson to be Sally, or it could be by transaction.

So it would depend whoever had processed that particular sale. So let's click save and we'll pop back to our invoice.

And now we have the option to choose our salesperson. Okay, that's fantastic. We've got that in. Oh, notice it's trying to push us to, uh, set up the payments. This is for if you are collecting payments through QuickBooks, you need to set this up. If you're not doing that, you can simply scroll right past it, look further in customization.

We've got some custom fields. I think that's great. Now we'll move down to design. So in the design section, that invoice we looked at earlier, it was totally fine. Actually. I quite liked it. I tend to be a little minimalist. It had the blue, but perhaps we'll go with green 'cause we're a landscaping company.

Outro

Those invoice settings don’t change how QuickBooks works behind the scenes, but they can make a real difference in how clear your invoices are and how easy they are to manage.

Once you’ve reviewed these options and set them up once, invoicing tends to stay consistent going forward.

Thanks for watching.

And take a look at some of the other templates.

So we're gonna edit the default. We could add a new style, but we're just gonna edit this one. So you can see here we have the design is the first thing. So we choose our template. This is. Likely the one that was being used. It's very open and airy is classic. It has a few more sections on it. There's this one they call Modern that has all the boxes.

It's fresh, which is anything but bold, which is just a little more cluttered and friendly bizarrely. So you could just choose whichever one you want. And because I'd like this to be an exercise, in contrast, I'm going to go with this modern one. So then you have the option to add your logo, which I'm not going to try to do in the sample company and splash on some color.

So, as I mentioned, we're a landscaping company. Let's go with some green. Now we can also change the font. Not a lot of options, but we've got some, I'm not a time new Roman fan, but let's just put it there so it will look completely different. And then we'll go to the content. So we have three boxes that we can make the changes in.

So in here we have the business name, which we may even wanna take off if we have a logo, but we don't have the logo. Uh, the phone number's not being shown. You can see that we don't have one, but we could easily put one here. And then there's an email. The actual address is showing up already. And the website, we could choose not to have the address and we could put, um, our website,

craigs landscaping.com. There we go. There. Now we have our website. So you have the option to select what is shown up in this section. So Bill two Smith Co. That is your customer information, leaving the form name there, the invoice.

That's smart because you want them to know what it is. And then there's, all of this is spread across the top here. So this is our invoice number, date, and, uh, the total amount due. It's kind of messy I think, but you know, it works. Uh, form numbers are there. And it's got terms and everything. Now, custom fields, I'm not too sure why we're not getting the option to pop that custom field on there, but let's see what happens when we actually do save it.

Let's look at this section now. So we did add in the date. So there overdue, we have the date. Now, if we took this off, once again, it would not show the service date, but we don't have the service date. We have the product and we have the option under the product to include the description so it will show up as part of the product.

Or we can have a separate column. Um, once again here, the quantity and the rate within the activity, it's kind of messy. I prefer the way we had it before, which is quantity and rate here. So let's then look at this bottom section. Um, it has. A little note, thank you for your business. Have a great day, and then you can put something on the footer.

Please make checks payable to Craig. How's that? Let's just see what the hat looks like. And there it is. Down the bottom there. Probably would not put there. You'd be more likely to have it up here, but you could. This would be a good place for the website. Maybe you put whatever you want there and we'll click done.

So now we can go and have a look and see what our invoice looks like.

Here I have an invoice for Bill's Windsurf Shop. I popped a couple of different service dates for some gardening so that we'd be able to see what that looked like when we had a look at our invoice. So let's take a look

and you can see this is that new format that we created. I think it looks kind of. Crowded. I, I really don't like a lot, but it gives you an idea of what you can do. You can change the colors and the format and those three different sections. So let's mark that as printed. Just do a little bit of a scroll down.

Scheduling here is actually kind of great because you can set up automatic reminders, so you could send it later, you can print it later. But I think the most valuable thing here is the ability to send reminders. So typically I would turn on all three of them. So three days before it's due on the due date and three days after.

Now, one thing to keep in mind here is that. If Bill hasn't paid you three days after, that's the end of the reminders. He will not be getting any more reminders after that. So you'll need to follow up yourself to ensure that that happens. So you can pop into here and manage when these are.

Uh, and you could perhaps choose the due date three days after and then maybe a week after with escalating Lee, um, TSE emails. You'll be looking here. Customer reports will just show if there are any open invoices or all transactions that you have had with Bill. So if we now click review and send, I. We have a default that we can edit and we can see what our invoice looks like.

And we have an email address right here. So it's an invoice from Craig's and we click Send Invoice and hopefully then we'll get paid and you can see once again, QuickBooks is trying to get you to set up their online payments, which feel free to do if you don't have anything else working for you.

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