Sales: Creating an estimate
An estimate is what you send customers to describe work you want to do for them.
To create or edit an estimate
- Choose Customers > Create Estimate. How do I use this form?
- To create a new estimate, click the "Create an Estimate" on the left panel or click the + at the bottom of the list. To edit an estimate, select an estimate in the list on the left panel.
- Enter the information for the estimate, and click Save.
Note: You can also create sales forms using the Customer Center and Transaction Center .
What's on an estimate?
- Customer:Job. Select the customer or job you want to create the invoice for. You can also enter a new customer:job name, and QuickBooks will prompt you to set it up. QuickBooks will automatically alert you if you choose a customer:job that has outstanding billable time or costs .
- Account. If you have more than one Accounts Receivable account, choose which on you want to use. If you don't have more than one A/R account, you won't see this.
- Class. If you're using classes , choose which on you want to use. (If you don't see this, you need to turn classes on in Preferences.)
- Bill to. The address you have for the customer displays here. This is how the customer contact information will appear here. You can make any changes you need to.
- Date. Today's date, which you can change. Tip: Press + to increase the date by one day; press - to decrease the date by one day.
- Invoice Number. QuickBooks automatically increments this number by one for each new invoice. Tip: Press + to increase the number by one; press - to decrease the number by one.
- PO Number. If you're filling a purchase order (PO) from your customer, enter that PO number here.
- Terms. When do you want to get paid? Select the payment terms for this invoice.
- Item. Select what you are invoicing this customer for. You can include anything on the Items list here. You also enter a new item, and QuickBooks will prompt you to set it up. Tip: If you need to insert an item between two others, select the item line where you want the new one and choose Edit > Insert Line. Likewise, if you want to delete an item, select the item then choose Edit > Delete Line.
- Description. The description of the item you entered when you created the item. You can change this if you need to. Tip: You can enter multiple lines for your description, up to 4095 characters. Use Option-Return to put in a line break.
- Quantity. How many of the items does your customer need to pay you for? This could be 400 antennaes or 10 hours of web design. If you leave this blank, QuickBooks assumes the quantity is 1.
- Rate. How much you charge the item. If you entered this when you created the item, QuickBooks enters it for you. If you didn't or you need to change it, just edit this box.
- Amount. This is the total amount (Quantity x Rate) for this item that QuickBooks calculates for you.
- Taxable. If the item is taxable, click this box.
- Customer Message. A message for our customer, either on from your Customer Messages list or enter a new one.
- Tax. The tax item you assigned to the customer or the default tax if you have not assigned a tax item to the customer. QuickBooks uses the tax item to calculate the tax. You can also select a different rate from the list of tax items if you need to.
Other things to know about estimates:
- Create an invoice using an estimate. To create an invoice that uses the info you've got in an estimate, click Create Invoice. [add icon]. To learn lots more about how this works, read up on Progress Invoicing .
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Create a purchase order using an estimate.
Need to buy the stuff you've got recorded on an estimate?
- Click Create Purchase Order.
- Choose whether you want to create the PO for All allowable items on the estimate (good if you've only got items from one vendor on the estimate) or Selected items (good if you've got items from multiple vendors on the estimate).
- Select the items you want on your PO, if you chose that option.
- Finish up any additional info on your PO, click Save, and send the PO off to your vendor.
- Make an estimate inactive. If you have multiple estimates for a job and your customer has accepted one of the estimates, you might want to make the unaccepted estimates inactive. When you make an estimate inactive QuickBooks keeps a record of it, but does not use the estimate numbers in reports.
- More about using this form