Progress Invoicing in QuickBooks Online

Do you need to prepare multiple invoices from an estimate?  This feature is now available in QuickBooks Online!  You can better manage your cash flow, as can your customers!  No more waiting until the job is finished to invoice.  If you would like to see how this works, watch the video.

If you have been holding off switching from QuickBooks Desktop until this feature was available, reach out to me.  I can help ensure that your transition is seamless!

Any questions on how progress invoicing can help your business let me know.

Video Transcript:

Hi, Kerry here from MyQuickBookKeeping. Today we are going to have a look at one of the recent improvements to QuickBooks Online, and that’s the ability to do progress invoicing. The ability to do progress invoicing provides better transparency to your clients and customers and can help you to improve on your cash flow and I know it’s one of the reasons some people haven’t change from Quick Book Desktop to Quick Book Online. So let’s have a look today/to date about how that works.

So here we are in the US sample company. In order to do progress invoicing, we need to turn on that option. So we pop up here to the gear icon and go to accounts and settings. Under sales, we scroll down to where progress invoicing is. So we’re going to edit this so that now we can create multiple partial invoices from a single estimate and we’ll save it. So we’re done in this area and we’ll go to sales. We’re going to prepare an estimate for our customer, so let’s go here and select estimate today and we’ll select a customer.

Let’s go with Dylan and for Dylan we’re going to sell him some gardening—no, I don’t want the weekly gardening service, let’s go for a big job here—an installation and we’re going to send him an estimate of say 250 hours at $50 an hour and perhaps we’ll also add some—let’s say lighting and that can be one piece that will say 2,500 and the lighting has tax on it, this is probably something that we’ve set up earlier. So now, we will save and send our estimate to Dylan. Okay, we’re going to save and close it because we’re not really sending it anyway; it’s a sample company.

So now, let’s say that we’ve got off and we’ve done a whole pile of work for Dylan and we’ve been working on this job for a while, we need to pay our guys. We need to pay for the lighting, we’ve got to keep the lights on in our office too. So we’re going to go, we’re going to grab this estimate here from Dylan and we going to choose this option here to create an invoice. So how much do you want to invoice?

Let’s do a customer map for each line. So we’re going to create our invoice from the estimate and we’re going to say that we’re going to invoice him. And we’re going to invoice for half of this, so this will be—let’s see we’re going to go for a percentage; 50% of this 12,500 and then the garden lighting—we want to build all of this. Let’s say that we’ve installed all the lighting and we want to bill him for all of that and we’ll be finishing off the rest of the landscaping later. So we’re going to save and close this report or this invoice. Really we’ll save and send it, but we’re not sending it to Dylan, so we can’t.

So now, let’s return and have a look at this estimate and just see what’s remaining on it. We can see here that we had an original estimate for 15,000 we sent out the invoice for 8750 and the remaining subtotal is 6250. So this is much easier for typically for the client they can pay as it goes. It’s much better for you to have money as you go and it pays it down from that estimate and it’s so great that this feature is now included in our Quick Books.

If you have any questions or would like to know how this could work for your business, please do reach out—all the links are below. While you’re down there click like, subscribe to my channel and there’s a month-end checklist that you can download there as well which will help you to keep your books in order at the end of every month. And if there’s anything else you’d like to know, please do let me know, write a comment below, my next video could be for you. Cheers!