Sales: Creating an invoice
Any time that you do something or sell something for a customer, they need to pay you. If they don't pay you on the spot, then you can send them an invoice so they'll pay you later.
If you have an open estimate for a customer , QuickBooks lets you know this when you select the customer name on the invoice. You can then select which estimate you want to use to create an invoice.
- Choose Customers > Create Invoice. How do I use this form?
- To create a new invoice, click the "Create an Invoice" on the left panel or click the + at the bottom of the list. To edit an invoice, select an invoice in the list on the left panel.
- Enter the information for the invoice, and click Save.
Note: You can also create invoices using the Customer Center and Transaction Center .
- 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 or if there's an open estimate for the customer.
- 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 for 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 invoices:
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Add time and costs to your invoice. If you've incurred expenses for your customer, such as mileage or other expenes, you can add that to an invoice to be reimbursed by your customer.
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Invoice your customer in phases. Use progress invoicing to send invoices for parts of a job over a period of time.
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View payment history for the invoice. Click history to see the payments for this invoice.
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Apply a payment to the invoice. Click Payments to enter a payment your customer made for this invoice.
- New Group . Click New Group to go to the New Group window and set up a new customer group for batch invoicing .
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Print later . You can mark the invoice to be printed later—say, after you've finished creating a bunch of invoices. Here's how:
- Click this button (which turns light gray when it's active) if you want to add this invoice to the bunch that you'll print out later.
- When you're ready to print the forms, go to File > Print forms > Invoices.
- Choose the invoices you want to print. QuickBooks opens a print preview window.
- Click Print after you've checked the invoice forms to make sure they look right.
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Email later . You can mark this form to be emailed later—say, after you've finished creating a bunch of invoices. Here's how:
- Click this button (which turns light gray when it's active) if you want to add this invoice to the bunch that you'll email later.
- When you're ready to email out the forms, go to File > Email forms.
- Choose the forms you want to email. QuickBooks will send PDF copies of the forms you choose to your email program and provide default text for the cover email that will go to your customer.
- Click Send. Your customer will get the PDF invoice attached to the email message.
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Add to Calendar. You can add this invoice's due date to your calender. The Calendar app will give you a reminder on the day you should be getting paid.
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Apply sales tax. If you're charging sales tax for the items on this invoice, click Taxable to apply sales tax.
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Enable online payment. Click to add a link to this invoice that lets this customer pay online using the Intuit PaymentNetwork.
- You can mark an invoice as pending. There may be a time when you want to keep an invoice in draft form. In that case, you can mark it was Pending (Edit > Mark Invoice as Pending) and finalize it later.
- More about using this form