QuickBooks 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Invoicing

Telling your customers how much they owe you (called accounts receivable) and how soon they need to pay is an important step in accounting. After all, if money isn’t flowing into your organization from outside sources, eventually you’ll close up shop, closing your QuickBooks company file with it.

Although businesses use several different sales forms to bill customers, the invoice is the most popular, and, unsurprisingly, customer billing is often called invoicing. This chapter begins by explaining the difference between invoices, statements, and sales receipts—each of which is a way of billing customers in QuickBooks—and when each is most appropriate.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to fill in the QuickBooks versions of invoices, whether you’re invoicing for services, products, or both. If you track billable hours with QuickBooks, now’s when you tell the program to add your billable hour charges to invoices. Similarly, when you designate expenses as billable to customers, QuickBooks can chuck them into the invoices you create, too.

This chapter also explains how to handle a few special billing situations, like creating invoices when products you sell are on backorder. You’ll also learn how to create estimates for jobs in QuickBooks and then use them to generate invoices as you perform the work. And occasionally, you have to give money back to customers (like when they return the lime-green polyester leisure suits that suddenly went out of style), so you’ll also ...