Many companies incur certain expenses with the intent of selling those products or services purchased to their customers. There are features in QuickBooks Online (QBO) specifically designed to make this job easier.
As with all other parts of QBO, this area of the software undergoes regular improvement as the engineers constantly work at developing and improving the product. This is one of the benefits of online accounting software. The improvements and new features are constant, not only available in a once-a-year software version.
We have touched on this topic before, but since it is in constant change, it’s time to look again.
Above is screenshot of an invoice. This is from the sample company, Craig’s Landscape Design. The customer is Amy’s Bird Sanctuary.
You can see along the right hand side of the invoice screen, a number of expenses have been created with the intent of invoicing the customer for these items. If we wanted to grab all of them at once and create one invoice, we would choose the Add All button.
As you can see from the above screen shot, when we make the selection to add all, the invoice lines are populated with the expenses and they no longer appear on the right side of the window. There is also a link that is added to the invoice. You can see that where the arrow points.
This link not only tells us that six items were added to the invoice, but if we click on it, we will have a couple of options for working with those items.
The link opens a list of the included items for review. You can remove any of the lines you wish. You can also remove all the lines which will cause them to appear along the right of the invoice window as when we started.
Looking back at the first graphic in this post, there is also a field with a drop down list above the button to Add All. The dropdown allows you to filter the time and expense transactions available in the list. You can elect to work with only expense items for invoicing, or time items.
You may approach the difference between the expense incurred by the company and the price charged to the customer in a couple of different ways. It may be that the items you track and then invoice to customers have standard prices and that is the amount that will be invoiced.
QBO does have the ability though, to allow you to simply markup the cost of the time or expense individually with each transaction. In this case, QBO will give you the following information:
The equipment rental charge takes two lines on the invoice. One for the actual expense, another for the markup. It’s a little hard to read QBO’s notation since it is in a light color on the screen. If you look closely however, you will see that QBO is telling you your customer will not see the separate markup on their copy of the invoice.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
7791 NW 46th St. Suite 109
Doral, FL 33166
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
