Create an Invoice from an Estimate for Completed Job in QuickBooks Pro 2017
During this QuickBooks Pro 2017 tutorial video, we will go through the options found on the estimates screen and talk about its uses.
Okay we’re in the middle of talking about Estimates. We’re working in module 4 right now which is Working with Customers & Jobs and we’re actually in section 2 and this is part 2 of Estimates.
Alright let’s go ahead and look at some of your options that you have when you’re working with estimates.
Starting at the top under the main tab you’re going to see these two arrows that will take you to the next or previous estimate. One thing to know when you’re searching in QuickBooks is everything is in date order. So you may think that you just entered one right before this. It may or may not be the previous one if you use the arrows just based on the dates.
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Let’s say you’re using the arrows and you just can’t find the one you’re looking for. There’s a Find option right here. You can type in some of the criteria that you might know, like maybe the date or if you know the amount, and search for it that way. You just put your criteria in and hit Find and it’ll search for you.
The next button over is New and this will create a new blank estimate and it’s going to save the one you’re on. And by the way, that’s the exact same thing as Save and New in the bottom right of your screen here.
Alright the next option says Save. If you’re working on this for a while and you just don’t want to lose whatever you’ve got hit the Save button here and it will save it to that point. If you click the dropdown you’ll notice you can also save this as a PDF. That way if you need to send it to someone they don’t have to have QuickBooks to actually open this.
There’s your Delete option. So if you want to delete this transaction you can do it right here. There’s also an option to create a copy. You will get an exact duplicate of this and then you can make those few changes that you might need to make.
Let me mention Memorize and we’re actually going to go through this in a later module. But if this is an estimate that needs to happen on a regular basis you can set it up so it’s memorized and will automatically show up based on the criteria that you’ve actually put in.
One of the things you can do now is you can mark any transaction as Inactive. And basically what that means is that when you pull a report it’s not going to pull those numbers onto the report. So it’s basically there but not really there. It’s inactive.
Under Print, we’ve already seen a preview so you know what this looks like. Notice you can also print this estimate. That’s how you would print this. Or print an envelope. If you printed an envelope you would have to have Microsoft Word because it does a mail merge and creates an envelope in there. Notice also you can save again as a PDF and we’ve already seen that option.
Here’s your email option. You can email this estimate. You can email this estimate and any attached files and also the batch. Just to tell you what a batch means. Do you see this little checkbox here that you can check or uncheck? If you needed to create multiple estimates create them and check each one of these and when you’re done you can email the batch. That would be all the ones with the checkmark.
Here’s where you could attach a file and this could be any file. It might be a file you scanned in or just some file on your computer you can attach it here.
And also you can create an invoice based on this estimate. Now chances are you’re not going to be on this estimate when you’re ready to create the invoice but it is an option if you wanted to use it at this point.
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Just to tell you what this is. Inuit has a product called Mavenlink which is more of the project management side of things where you can manage the expenses in your work. So if you wanted to get a free trial of that you could.
Now the next tab is Formatting and several things here we’ll be looking at later but these options right here we’ll be looking at when we talk about customizing an estimate or customizing the layout of the form.
Here’s your Spellcheck. Please run spellcheck. The worst thing in the world is to be sending out an estimate to a brand new customer with misspellings. It makes you look very unprofessional.
You can insert a line, delete a line or copy a line. It’s always the one you’re clicked on. See if I clicked here and I insert a line it goes above it? If I’m clicked on it I can delete it or I can copy that line as well. Here’s the Paste. So if I’ve copied it I could paste it in.
And this is some more of the customizing of the form we’re going to be doing in a later module.
The next tab over is Send/Ship. This is where you can create mail merge documents and merge these with Microsoft Word.
And then the last tab are your reports. You’ve got several different reports that are not based just on this customer but they’re based on estimates. You can see one by job, if you want to see the actual versus what you estimated, maybe a price list, those types of things. So most of the options will be under the Main tab but you see there are other ones there as well if you want to use them.
Now that you know how estimates work why don’t we go ahead and talk about creating an invoice based on this estimate? Let’s go over to section 3 and I will meet you there.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
