QuickBooks 2011: 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 and close your QuickBooks company file for the last time.

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 send invoices for the same items to many of your customers, QuickBooks 2011’s new batch invoice feature can help: You select the customers you want, add the items you want on the invoice, and QuickBooks creates all the invoices for you automatically.

If you track billable hours with QuickBooks, you can also have the program add your billable hour charges to invoices. And if you designate expenses as billable to customers, QuickBooks can chuck them into the invoices you create, too.

Finally, you’ll find out 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 ...