Keep Up With Leads in QuickBooks

If you are like most businesses, you have prospects contacting you who want to possibly do business with you and you hopefully have customers who want to do more business with you. How do you keep up with it all?
The Lead Center came out in the 2012 version of QuickBooks. While very basic, it is certainly better than trying to keep up with it all in your head or on a sheet of paper or notebook. If it's not already on your toolbar, click on Customers>Lead Center.
What I like about is:
• Leads don't affect your "Names" total. If you are in Pro or Premier, there's a maximum number of names you can have in your system (14,500). Names include Customers, Vendors, Employees and Other names (jobs and inactives count. If you have lots of leads, but they don't always convert, that's nice to know.
• You can have multiple contacts, multiple locations, as well as a variety of fields (which include social media).
• You can rate your lead as hot, cold, or warm
• You can make leads inactive if the deal doesn't go through.
• Like the other centers, there are pertinent tabs. So you can easily get to different locations, for a lead, create "to-do's" and you can have lots of notes. You can even create "to-do" reports.
• If you have leads in a spreadsheet, you can easily copy and paste the contact information into QuickBooks so you don't have to duplicate work you already did.
• What I also like is that with a click of a button, you can convert your lead to a customer.
So as I stated earlier, it's better than keeping it all in your head or in a notebook or... However, there are limitations, as you might imagine.
• If you want to create an estimate, you have to convert your lead to a customer. For many, this is not an issue, but pressing F2 will quickly let you know just how big your Names list is. But for some, that can be a deal breaker.
• There is no integration with your email. So in your notes or to-do's you can reference emails, but to actually generate an email or see what an email said, you won't be doing that in the lead center.
• You can't use any custom fields, so all the information will also need to go into your notes. And you won't be able to get reports that tell you possible dollars you could make on this deal or a rate of conversion.
But for simple needs, it's all in one place. And for some, that's a good deal!

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