Invoicing in QuickBooks Online

Sending and receiving invoices is a common workflow for most small businesses. It’s also a key part of the sales cycle.

In QuickBooks Online, users can create invoices when they sell products and services, but expect customers to pay for them in the future. These forms key details about the sale, such as the buyer and seller as well as the products and services sold. This lets users keep track of their open and completed sales.

Learn how QuickBooks Online users create and send invoices.

Small businesses sell products and services to all sorts of customers. Customers can be individuals or other businesses. Sales can be online or in-person.

The invoicing process usually starts when a customer purchases products and services but money isn’t exchanged right away. It may also come from a project estimate that gets converted to an invoice once the work starts.

The small business delivers the product or service. They can then create and send an invoice directly from QuickBooks.

There are a few ways businesses can record sales in QuickBooks:

• If users expect customers to pay for products or services in the future, send an invoice.
• If customers pays for the products or services at the time of the sale, give them a sales receipt.

Users can easily track all open and closed (i.e. paid for) invoices in QuickBooks. These also show up on key financial reports.

Since customers don’t pay for invoices right away, businesses need a way to track what’s still owed to them. This is where accounts receivable (AR, A/R) comes in. Accounts receivable tracks the outstanding balance all customers owe to a business at a givent ime. Basically, it’s an account that tracks the total of all open, unpaid invoices. Learn more about accounts receivable.

If customers return products or services and you need to give them a refund, you can create a refund receipt in QuickBooks.

Invoices provide details about the customer and the business selling the items, an itemized list of what’s being sold, the transaction total, and additional details such as the due dates and terms.

Invoice forms always include an itemized list. Each line on the list represents a specific item (product or service), or a specific detail about the sale.

• You can use lines to list a unique product or service to the invoice
• You can use lines to add item bundles (also known as “groups”), discounts, and subtotals to the invoice

In QuickBooks Online, invoices are always associated with items and customers so businesses can track what’s being sold and who they’re selling to:

• Invoices are always linked to a customer
• Invoices always contain one or more items (i.e. products and services) for sale

Invoicing is a fundamental sales and accounting workflow in QuickBooks Online.

Many apps provide invoicing features, or at least connect to end-users’ QuickBooks invoice data. Creating invoices requires you to reference specific customers, accounts, items (products and services), and other objects. These may or may not already exist for a given user’s QuickBooks Online company.

When you’re developing your app, think about how it will link invoices with the correct items, customers, and accounts.

You can create and query invoice data via the invoice entity. Also make sure you know how this works with item and customer.

Before you get too far into development, set up the basic invoicing implementation so you have pre-created objects to reference and use.

Once you set up the implementation, you can start using the Invoice entity to create invoices.