QuickBooks Online (QBO) has added considerable flexibility to the customization of invoices and sales receipts. This means, you can alter and re-arrange your sales documents to fit the individual needs of your business.
When creating a multi-line invoice manually, you can place the items on the document in whatever order you choose. When creating the invoice or sales receipt from billable items however, the order is not always what you would like.
Unless you are aware of the settings.
In the sample file, Craig’s Design and Landscaping Services, let’s create an invoice from several billable time entries. By choosing the option to ‘Add All’, we get the following invoice.
Notice that the services listed on the invoice are not grouped. Each time entry into the weekly time sheet has been placed on the invoice in date order.
By choosing certain settings, we are able to control this process automatically.
Perhaps we like date order, but think it would make the invoice easier to read if the dates were grouped and subtotaled by week.
In Company Settings (gear icon), Sales Group (the left-hand panel), we can customize the look and feel of our sales form templates.
Once within the customization window, select the Activity Table section as shown below.
The circled area shows the settings that we need. We choose to group the items on our invoice template by week and to subtotal each of those groups.
With this setting saved, how will our invoice look if we ‘Add All’ the billable time entries at once?
The above print preview of our new invoice shows how changing the settings dramatically changed the appearance of the sales form.
But, we have more options.
Above, you can see the customization options window we worked in before. This time, we are re-setting the options to group the billable time items on the invoice by type and to subtotal by those groups. We also selected the ‘Collapse activity rows’ option.
From the above preview of the printed invoice, you can see the new look from just the change in setting. The above invoice was created in the same way as the other two. A customer was selected that had several billable time transactions associated with them. Choosing the add all the time in one selection resulted in a much different result because of the setting changes.
There are a number of options in the customization window that should allow you to get the look and feel you want. Note that these settings are specific to the invoice template. Since you can have several invoice templates, you could have one that grouped by item, one that grouped by date, etc.
These settings work with sales receipts as well.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
7791 NW 46th St. Suite 109
Doral, FL 33166
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
