Some companies perform regular services for their customers. These services are completed and invoiced on a calendar basis. Often this means monthly, but that is not always the case.
QuickBooks Online (QBO) has a great feature for dealing with situations like this without a lot of manual data entry.
Let’s use our sample company, Craig’s Design and Landscaping Services. While this company does a lot of one time design and landscape contracting jobs, they also perform regular gardening services.
The customers of this service are invoiced once a month. The service costs a flat monthly fee, individual for each customer.
The first step is to create the first invoice for the customer.
Above is the invoice for Craig’s customer, Amy’s Bird Sanctuary. The invoice is for gardening services of $125. This is Amy’s monthly fee.
At the bottom of the invoice form is a button labeled Make Recurring. Click that button.
Above is the setup window for the recurring invoice. The information to make it work like the description earlier has already been entered.
In the top section, you can see this will be a scheduled transaction. We do not want it created earlier than the date we specify.
The subsequent section specifies the customer which QBO knows since we started this process from a customer invoice already being entered.
Note the arrow. QBO can be configured to create and email this invoice with no required input from the company. Very automated.
The second arrow shows the fields for instructing QBO how often to create the invoice. As it stands now, the invoice will be created on the first of each month beginning with August 1st, 2015. No end date has been set.
The address and terms come from the customer file. The services to be included on the invoice result from the invoice we started with. In this case, gardening services for $125.
Once we save the template, the process is complete. QBO will create the invoice, just as we described, and email it to the customer on the 1st of each month.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
12401 Orange Drive #136
Davie, FL 33330
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
