Are you tired of having to skip over fields that you never use when entering invoice or other transactions? The Layout button can streamline data entry by letting you hide fields in the Quotes, Sales Orders, Sales/Invoicing, Purchase Order, and Purchases/Receive Inventory (aka Enter Bills) screens.
In any of the windows I just listed, you’ll find a Layout button near the right end of the toolbar at the top of the window. Click it and choose Customize Invoice Layout (actual wording will vary depending on which screen you’re in). Click the New button to start a new layout and give it a name and description. Or to modify an existing layout choose it at Template Name. Note that you can’t edit the predefined templates. Next to each field name, just check the box under Entry Screen to show the field on-screen or clear the box to hide it. Any boxes that are checked and grayed out are required fields.
You may notice that there is no option here to hide or show the GL Account field. That option existed long before the Layout button was added so it was left in its original location – in the Options menu > Global.
In addition to the Entry Screen check boxes, there are also Printed Form boxes you can check or clear to show or hide each field on printed forms. However you may not want to use them, especially to show a field that was hidden. Unchecking the box simply removes that data field from the printed form without adjusting the layout. For example, if you clear the “Printed Form” box for Customer PO Number, you’ll still have a box on the invoice labeled “Customer PO Number” but nothing will print in it. And if you check a box to add it to the printed form, that field will be placed at the top of the page or sometimes even off the page, depending on which field you added. So while it can be a convenient way to add fields to a form, you will have to use the form designer to make the form usable.
Speaking of the form designer, the blue underlined options are hyperlinks that will open the form designer so you can make more extensive changes to the way the form will print.
When you save your changes and close the Layout window, Sage 50 will automatically start using your new layout.
If you find you need a field that is hidden, just click the Template/Layout button and choose one of the standard formats to see all of the fields again. When you are done, you can switch back to your custom version the same way.
If your screens don’t look like this, see how to do this in older versions of Peachtree Accounting, see my earlier post at https://www.iqaccountingsolutions.com/blog/customize-transaction-entry-screens-with-layouttemplate-button/
