Choose Billable Time and Costs window

This window lists all the hours, item purchases, and expenses you have assigned to the current customer or job. From these lists, you can select which costs you want to appear on the invoice you are writing or in the customer register where you are entering statement charges. If you are writing an invoice, you can also have QuickBooks calculate a markup and apply the markup to each expense.

How do the costs get here?

To select costs:

  1. (Statement charges only) Indicate how you want to date the statement charges it creates for the costs you select.
  2. Click the tab(s) for the kind of costs you want to include on the invoice:
  3. In the Use column, click next to each cost you want to include.

    Tip: Click Select All to select all the costs listed on the tab you have displayed.

  4. (Expenses only) If you are writing an invoice and you want QuickBooks to calculate sales tax on the expenses you've selected, click the “Selected expenses are taxable” checkbox. This option is not available for statement charges.

    On the invoice, a “T” appears next to each expense amount to indicate that it is taxable.

  5. (Time only) If you want to combine all activities that have the same service item into a single line on the invoice, or if you want to choose how QuickBooks fills in the Description field on the invoice or in the customer register, click Change to display the Options for Transferring Billable Time window.

To exclude a cost:

Make sure that no check mark appears next to the cost in the Use column. If a check mark does appear, click the check mark to remove it.

The cost does not appear on the invoice or as a statement charge, but QuickBooks keeps the cost on the list. You'll be able to bill your customer for the cost in the future if you wish.

To remove a cost from the list:

If you know that you will never bill the customer for a cost, click in the Hide column next to the cost.

This removes the cost permanently from the list. It DOES NOT remove the original transaction (check, credit card charge, bill, etc.) from your records. Your reports will still show the cost as associated with the customer or job.

To mark up particular expenses (invoices only):

  1. Click the Expenses tab to bring it to the front.
  2. Click in the Use column to select the expenses you want to mark up.
  3. If necessary, change the markup shown in the “Markup amount or %” field. To apply a different markup to each expense

    QuickBooks fills in this field with the markup you set (choose QuickBooks > Preferences and click Sales & Invoicing). If you decide to change the markup here, it applies only to this invoice. You can enter the markup either as a flat amount (for example, 10.00 — which QuickBooks would interpret as ten dollars) or as a percentage (for example, 10% — which QuickBooks would interpret as ten percent). If you enter a percentage, be sure to include the % sign.

  4. In the Markup Account field, enter the name of the account you use to track markup income.
  5. If you don't want your customer to see the markup amount on the printed invoice, select the “Print selected time and costs as one invoice item” checkbox.

To print the costs as a single line item (invoices only):

Select the “Print selected time and costs as one invoice item” checkbox.

What this does: When you print the invoice, it shows only the total of the costs with the description “Total reimbursable expenses” (you can change this description if you wish). Showing only the total is useful if the list of costs is quite long, or if you don't want your customer to see a detailed breakdown of the costs. When you select this option, you still see the complete breakdown of the costs on the onscreen version of the invoice.

What if you want more than one summary?