How to Create an Invoice from an Estimate in QuickBooks 2019 – Part 2

Watch this QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial, we will continue with creating an invoice from estimates and take a look at the buttons found in the Main, Formatting, Send/Ship, and Reports tabs. We will also show you how to display the open invoice.

We are working in module four, and we’re all the way down to section three. Now, we’re talking about invoicing from estimates. We’ve already talked about how to actually create that invoice.

Let’s go ahead and finish talking about some of the options you have that are on the screen when you’re actually invoicing your customers.

Let’s go ahead and keep going through these buttons on the Main tab. We’re all the way over to attach a file. If you have any files related to this particular invoice that you just want to keep attached you can do that here. Again, you would do that because you don’t want to leave QuickBooks to go search for them at some point.

Here’s a couple of new buttons you have not seen. The first one is Add Time/Cost. Let me tell you a little bit about this and then we’ll actually look at it more in depth in a later module.

You’re going to have a lot of expenses you incur related to this particular invoice you’re creating. As you’re creating those expenses, whether you use the credit card, you write a check, the debit card, it really doesn’t matter how the expense is created. But, there will be a field there where you can put in the customer and the job.

If you have done that then you have the ability to pull those into this particular invoice whenever you’re ready to invoice your customer to get reimbursed. It’s a great little feature if you have those type of expenses.

The next one is Apply Credits. If you have already created a credit memo you can come here and apply that credit memo to this invoice. Progress will basically just show you the progression from the estimate to the invoice – how far you’ve gotten in that whole progressive cycle there.

You can receive a payment. If the customer gives you a down payment, for example, you can receive it here. But chances are you’re not going to be on this window when you’re ready to receive a payment.

You can create a batch. Let’s say there were three different customers who were going to pay this invoice. Maybe they were each going to pay a third of it.

You can actually take this one invoice and it will create one and send it to multiple customers. That’s a pretty neat feature if you need it.

Also, there’s your refund or credit option. If you’re going to actually create a credit memo or you’re going to refund a customer for something this would be how to do it.

Let’s go to the Formatting tab and see if there’s anything new there. And all of this is the exact same as we saw when we were working with our estimates. These are going to allow you to customize the invoice template.

There’s your spellcheck, insert a line, delete a line, and copy a line. And again this has to do with customizing your template. Under the tab Send/Ship here’s something new. Let’s say that you actually ship physical items.

You can actually schedule your FedEx, your UPS, or your United States Postal Service right from here. What’s really cool is, if I went ahead and said ship FedEx package, it would take me right to the FedEx website. So, I don’t have to get out of QuickBooks go over there and log in. All I would have to do is just log in from this screen, and I’d be ready to ship my package.

These two here have to do with mail merges with Microsoft Word.

Your last tab has your reports. Again, the important one I want you to be aware of is the transaction history because this is going to let you see the actual estimate that started the whole thing – how many invoices have been created, any payments towards this invoice, all the way through.

Here are your reports that have to do with invoicing. You’ve got one where you can view the open invoices. Those are ones that have not yet been paid. You can look at your sales by customer detail and also your average days to pay.

That’s going to be your options as far as creating invoices this way. I’m going to go ahead and hit Save & Close at the bottom and now you’ll see that we’re back in our Customer Center. You can see here that we have an invoice and an estimate for our customer.

Now what I’d like to do is go ahead and invoice my customer for the remaining amounts that were on that estimate. I’m just going to repeat the same process basically. Then, I’ll be going back to Create Invoices.

I’m going to pull in my customer and my job. I’m going to choose the estimate that I want to pull from, and something that might confuse you is sometimes people are looking for this amount to be a little different.

They think it should have decreased by the amount of the first invoice but it doesn’t. This is always the amount of the original estimate. I’m going to go ahead and click OK and I want you to notice that this time the first one is a little bit different.

Notice it asks me if I’d like to create an invoice for the remaining amounts of the estimate. I could do another percentage or I could select Items or different percentages for each item.

I’ll go ahead and choose the first one this time, and pull in the remaining amounts and click OK. And now you can see that my quantity has brought in anything that hasn’t yet been invoiced.

Again, if I wanted to add that delivery charge I could certainly do that. I’ll add another one at $25. And then you are familiar with everything around the screen already so we won’t go back through that. But that’s how you’re going to invoice for whatever was left.

What I want to do now is that’s all you need to know about creating invoices from estimates. Let’s go ahead and look at section four and I’ll show you how to invoice your customers for products and services when you don’t have an estimate.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education.Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.