QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Creating Invoices

Depending on the QuickBooks edition you use, you have up to three ways to create invoices:

• Create Invoices used to be your only option for creating invoices in QuickBooks 2007 and earlier, and it’s still the only option if you use QuickBooks Pro. This command can handle everything you throw at it: services, products, billable time, and billable expenses. It’s available in QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise.

• Create Batch Invoices is new in QuickBooks 2011. With a batch invoice (Creating Batch Invoices), you select all the customers to which you want to send the same invoice. If you send the same invoice to the same customers all the time, you can set up a billing group for those customers and, from then on, simply choose the group. After you create the invoice, you can print or email it to the customers in the list.

• Invoice for Time & Expenses, available only in QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise editions, can do everything that the Create Invoices window can do, but it’s a real time-saver when you invoice for billable time and expenses. As you’ll learn in detail on Adding Billable Time and Costs to Invoices, you specify a date range and QuickBooks shows you all the customers who have billable time and expenses during that period. When you choose a customer or job and tell the program to create an invoice, it opens the Create Invoices window, fills in the usual fields, and fills the invoice table with the customer’s billable time and expenses. ...