QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Invoices

Invoices tell your customers everything they need to know about what they purchased and the payment they are about to make. If you created your customers and jobs with settings such as payment terms and sales rep (page 58), filling in your typical invoice is almost effortless. As soon as you choose a customer and job in the Customer:Job field, QuickBooks fills in most of the fields for you.

Some fields on an invoice are more influential than others, but they all come in handy at some point. To digest the purpose of the fields on an invoice more easily, you can break an invoice up into three basic sections, as illustrated in Figure 8-1. Because the invoices you create for product sales include a few more fields than the invoices for services only, the following sections use a product invoice to explain how to fill in each field you might run into on the invoices you create. If the information that QuickBooks fills in for you is incorrect, these sections also tell you where to go to correct the problem.

Note

If you charge your customers based on the progress you've made, invoices are a little more complicated, but you'll learn how to handle this situation on page 207.

Figure 8-1. The top of the invoice has overall sale information, like the customer and job, the invoice date, who to bill to and ship to, and the payment terms. The table in the middle has info about each ...