Options for billing customers

QuickBooks provides several ways to bill your customers:

Invoices and reminder statements serve the needs of most businesses. If you bill periodically for charges that accumulate over time, you may want to consider using billing statements.

About invoices

An invoice lists what you sold on one date, showing the quantity and cost of each item. Use invoices if:

Each invoice stores information that you can draw from later when you analyze your business. For example, if you want to know the sales income for each item in your inventory, you can create a report (Sales by Item Summary) that provides those numbers. The line item detail on your invoices makes this possible.

Reminder statements work with invoices

When you use invoices to bill your customers, you can also send reminder statements to notify your customers about delinquent payments. A reminder statement summarizes what you've billed previously through invoices by listing the invoices you've sent, credits you've given, and any payments you've received. You don't have to enter more data to create a reminder statement — QuickBooks already knows what needs to appear on the statement.

If you bill periodically

You may find that billing statements serve your needs. When you use billing statements, you generally do not write invoices. Instead, you keep a record of each customer's charges in a special register called the customer register. When it's time to send out statements, QuickBooks prints the statements by using your entries in the customer registers.

Examples of businesses that use billing statements include medical and dental practices, small consulting firms who accumulate charges and then bill them all at once, and property management companies who bill periodically for rent or accumulated services.

Limitations of billing statements

Billing statements have some limitations when compared with invoices: