QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Cash Sales

Receiving payment at the same time that you deliver the service or products is known as a cash sale, even though your customer might pay you with cash, check, or credit card. For example, if you run a thriving massage therapy business, your customers probably pay for their stress relief before they leave your office—and no matter how they pay, QuickBooks considers the transaction a cash sale.

If your customers want records of their payments, you give them sales receipts. In QuickBooks, a Sales Receipt can do double-duty; it records your cash sale in the program and you can print it as a paper sales receipt for your customer. Although cash sales are a simultaneous exchange of money and goods (or services), you don't actually have to create a QuickBooks sales receipt at the time of the sale. Here are the two most common approaches for handling cash sales:

• Recording individual sales. If you want to keep track of which customers purchase which products, create a separate sales receipt for each cash sale. Individual sales receipts track both customers' purchases and the state of inventory.

  Tip

  If you keep QuickBooks open in your store, you can print individual sales receipts for your customers. But keeping QuickBooks running on the store computer could be risky if the wrong people started snooping into your records. And, unless you're completely proficient with sales receipts in the program, you might find paper sales receipts faster when your store is swamped. When there's ...