QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Progress Invoices

When you work on jobs and projects that take more than a few days, you probably don't want to wait until the job is completely finished to charge for some of your work. Progress invoices include charges based on both your estimate and the progress you've made on the job. These invoices are common for jobs that are broken into phases or when payments occur when you reach milestones. Since most large jobs start with an estimate, you won't have to start from scratch when it's time to invoice your customer. QuickBooks can convert your estimates into progress invoices with a few additional pieces of information.

Note

To produce progress invoices, you must first turn on the preferences for both creating estimates and progress invoicing (page 142).

Progress Invoicing Options

Progress invoices are still invoices; they just happen to link to estimates you've created for a job. In the Create Invoices dialog box, when you choose a customer or job, QuickBooks checks to see if an estimate exists. If at least one estimate for the customer or job does exist, QuickBooks opens the Available Estimates dialog box, so you can choose an estimate to invoice against, as illustrated in Figure 8-11.

When you create your first progress invoice, you can choose to invoice the entire estimate or only a portion. Here are the options that appear in the Create Progress Invoice Based on Estimate dialog box and when you might use them:

• Create invoice for the entire estimate (100%). This option ...