Master Tips on QuickBooks Billing Processes

Items must be set up to capture the business of the firm. If the items are set up properly, the "Sales by Item" report will be very useful to the firm, but more importantly, items are used to point to the correct general ledger accounts set up in the COA. Service, inventory and non-inventory items can point to an income and a COGS account both. This will help you track the money coming in and going out. It streamlines your invoicing and recording of bills you receive and you can pull great reports to show your most profitable work.

NOTE: Keep in mind that your most profitable service/item is often a very small percentage of your total income and therefore does not bring in the most money).

FORMSForms are used to provide communication to clients. They include estimates, sales orders, invoices and statements. They are customizable to include firm logos, special fields, and columns for date of service, units of measure, and price per unit. There can be different information provided on an input on-screen basis versus what is printed for the client.  You can usually modify QBooks template forms to look like almost any pre-printed form. Estimates can be used as proposals for future work. It can be monitored as "open quotes" in the estimates section of the Customer Center.  Sales orders can be renamed as "proforma invoice" where the proposal is converted to a sales order. The primary purpose is the have the client sign the Proforma invoice and pay a deposit against future work. Another approach is to list in the Proposal (Estimate), a series of progress payments. If this approach is used, the "convert estimate to invoice" routine can be established and an invoice created for the initial deposit and all subsequent progress payments. This is a great way to be sure of billing completely for each project.  Statements can be prepared in a variety of ways to work into the needs of the accountant or consultant. Finance charges can be applied easily. The statements can list invoice numbers or they can be created in a manner which lists all line items for each invoice.  All forms can be either printed or sent out as an attachment to an e-mail. Invoicing can also be integrated into QuickBooks Merchant Services. Intuit does frequent webinars on this topic. The schedule can be found at www.accountant.intuit.com. If invoicing is done on a recurring basis, then a memorized transaction can be set up to manage this automatically.   Reports There are a series of reports that are very beneficial to manage the practice. The reports can be run on a cash or accrual basis. Some reports should be looked at on one basis of accounting rather than the other. For example, the total billings are important to see on accrual basis because that shows the production per month, but to show a P&L by customer on a cash basis, reflects your ability to collect from clients.  If you don’t get the report you want from the QBooks template reports, you can create your own. QBooks Premier and Enterprise give you must greater leeway in editing reports than Pro, but with a little ingenuity, you can get almost any information out of QuickBooks into an easy-to-read report.

Time Capturing for Employees and Outside Contractors Time capturing is often used in consulting work. QuickBooks provides several ways to capture time that will subsequently interface to the invoice processing. QuickBooks Timer is a program on each QuickBooks program disk that can be loaded on each time-keeper's computer so they can enter time activities throughout the day. QuickBooks also introduced an on-line time keeping module in 2006 which allows timekeepers to enter time through a web connection. A third method is to enter time directly into the time module of QuickBooks itself. If time is entered into the time module of QuickBooks through any of the above routines, it can be brought into the invoice by client.

When a new invoice transaction is initiated, and there is time or costs to add, then the Add Time/Costs... icon is activated. When opened, time and costs can be added to the invoice. The Date field becomes service date on an invoice. Items can be grouped if detail information is not needed on the invoice. A special note: if detailed information is not shown on the invoice, it is still retained in the system for future reference.

Outside Contractor Services QuickBooks has the capability of capturing outside contractor charges that should be re-billed to a client. This situation arises often if the prime accountant/consultant hires and has to bill the services of specialists. When the outside contractor's invoices are entered, if a client (customer) name is added to the bill, then the charge can be added to a client invoice later, in a similar fashion as bringing employee time into the invoice.   Customer Center The Customer Center provides a wonderful tool to monitor the client (customer) activities of your business. Views can be seen by client (customer), or for the overall business. The views can be of all transactions or certain type of transactions such as estimates (proposals), or invoices in total. If the view is by outstanding invoices, this is the same as outstanding Accounts Receivable, but is real time and in a display mode, rather than having to print out a big report.  The view can be modified to add information by modifying columns.

Summary The billing process in QuickBooks is very complete and offers consultants and other entrepreneurs a great opportunity to manage and control his or her business.