How to Receive Payments in QuickBooks 2019

Watch QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial. We will talk about how to receive payments. You will learn how to properly create payments and set them up so that they pay off the invoices.

All right! We are still working in module four and we’re all the way down now to section five, Receiving Payments. This is the fun stuff is when we actually get paid.

What I want to show you now is how to actually tell QuickBooks that you’ve received the payment for an invoice. It doesn’t matter how the customer pays you. You’re going to enter the payment in the same exact way. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks.

This time, I’ll show you how to receive those payments.

We’ve already estimated a job! We’ve created a couple of invoices based on that estimate and an additional one. Now we’re going to go ahead and tell QuickBooks that we’ve been paid for some of this.

I’m going to click, Receive Payments.

No matter how the customer pays you this is how you want to enter the payment. The first thing, it asks you is, who is the customer, and the job you’re receiving the payment for.

You’ll notice, as soon as you pull in that information, that it lists a couple of things for you. Here’s the total that the customer owes you right over here.

It also lists each invoice that has not been fully paid, even if there is a penny left. It will list that invoice here! You’ll see the original amount. You’ll see the amount due. And then, once you start applying for the payments, you’ll see how much of that was applied over in this column.

I’m going to go back to the payment amount and type in how much the customer paid me. I’m going to say they paid $4,099.75.

I wanted to show you what happens if you’re over or under. You’ll notice right down here, it tells me I have an underpayment of $0.04. I have a couple of choices. I can leave it on their account and hope they’ll pay me later or I can write off the extra amount.

I’m going to leave it in their account for now so I could show you later how to just go and do a credit memo for that.

Back up at the top, I’m going to put in the date I received the payment and notice now there’s a field for the check number. Now, what you’ll notice here is this is where you tell QuickBooks how the customer paid you.

Depending on which of these options you’ve chosen this field will be different. When I choose the Cash option, it says, Reference Number.

If I choose Check, I can plug in a check number. If I choose Debit or Credit, it pulls up this Enter Credit Card Information window.

Now, just so you’ll know, you can’t actually run their card through unless you have the Intuit Merchant Services account. S,o there’s really no point in picking this. It’s really just for you to know how they paid.

Also, they could have paid with electronic check. And there are some options under the, More. They’ve got Barter already set up. They have Mastercard, but you could add some new payments methods.

For example, if you take PayPal, you may want to plug that in. It could be that you take, Square. It could be that you choose any of these other options here.

I’m going to go ahead and pick the payment. Type Other and click OK. Now, you’ll see that that’s in my list any time I’d like to use it.

The reason this Enter Card Information popped up when I chose PayPal is because PayPal actually has a debit card that you can get if you have a business account. You can just use that just like any other debit card.

I’m going to cancel there. You’ll notice also that it went ahead and checked all three invoices. It assumed I was paying all the first one, the balance of my payment went on the second one and the balance went on the third one.

You want to be really careful with that because sometimes a customer may have said something like, “I want to pay half on this one and half on this one.”

Or maybe they said put so much on each one of these. What you want to do is, if they’ve specified an amount you just come over here and type that amount towards that particular invoice.

Let’s look at some of our options up on our tabs across the top. I’m on the Main tab and you know a lot of these already. Here, are your Find options. There’s your New option which would actually save this payment and put me on a new blank one.

I can delete this payment. I might choose to print it or I might choose to email it to my customer, attach a file, also look up a customer/invoice.

Now, in saying that, let me just mention that, let’s say I was down here on this one and I wanted to look at it. I can double click and open it right from here. If you make a change to this and Save & Close. Then, that will automatically be reflected back here.

The next thing is to unapply your payments. That basically just unchecks them all. You can go back and manually check them and make sure you have the correct payment amount over on the right column.

You can apply discounts and credits. Also, if you had already saved this you could record a bounced check if that happened to be what happens in this situation.

You can also add credit card processing. This is where you would sign up for QuickBooks merchant services so that, you can process credit cards with them.

You’ve got your reports. Remember the important one, I want you to notice is the transaction history. Once we actually save this, I can click this button and go back and see the invoices that this paid and all the way back to the estimate.

I’ve also got a journal, a transaction journal is what they call it. and it basically shows me a timeline of actually everything that happened and when it happened.

I’ve also got some options to process a payment receipt. Basically, if I needed a printable receipt that I could give my customer, I can go ahead and print it out from here.

And then, I have some reports I can look at. I can look at open invoices. Those are ones that haven’t been paid. I can look at a customer balance detail, sales by item detail, and an item price list.

I have one quick question for you. Once we Save & Close down at the bottom; where do you think this payment goes? Well, let me show you real quick. I’m going to flip to Home and I want to pull up this Chart of Accounts.

There is an account in the Chart of Accounts here called, Undeposited Funds. You can see it right here. And you can see there is $2,440 in there currently.

This is an account where all the money goes and sits once you receive the payment. But this money has not yet been taken to the bank.

Meaning, it’s not in a deposit anywhere. One of the ways to keep a good check on yourself is if you’ve deposited all the money this should say zero.

I’m going to go back to Receive Payments for just a moment and I’m going to hit Save & Close and show you that that is going to go up by the amount of the payment that I just received. And you can see it’s gone up to $6,539.75 now.

I want to show you something that I briefly mentioned to you when we were looking at the preferences. I’m going to go back to Edit Preferences for a moment. One of the preferences that you have is when you click on the Payments on the left. And you go to the Company Preferences tab.

You’ve got this one here that says, Use undeposited funds, as a default deposit to the account. That’s why that money went into that account automatically.

I’m going to uncheck that and show you something. I’m going to click OK and it’s going to tell me it has to close all the windows to change this preference. That’s okay!

Now, what I want to do now is I’m going to go back to click Home and I’m going to maximize my window here. I want to go back to Receive Payments, but I’m going to go to that same payment that I had a few minutes ago.

I can click Receive Payments and try to hit my Back button and see if that takes me there. But an easier way is to go to my Customer Center.

I’ll go ahead and click on my customer and then, I’ll look for my payment on the list. If you notice I don’t see it and that’s because I’m looking at just this fiscal year.

I’m going to go ahead and say, “All from the top of the list“. And then, you’ll see the payment because I had actually changed the date to the next fiscal year. I’ll double click and open it. And there’s my payment!

I want you to notice now that I have this option to tell QuickBooks where I’d like to deposit the money to. That way instead of it automatically going into undeposited funds. I could skip a step and put it directly into my checking account if I’d like.

Now, let me give you a word of caution. This option here works great if it’s the only amount of money that’s going to be in this deposit. But let’s say this was actually two checks from two different customers.

Then, I would not want to pick this. I would want to put them both in undeposited funds and then, I could take the next step, which is to actually create a deposit.

What I want to do now is go ahead and take you over into section six and that’s where we’re going to talk about creating these deposits. Let me go ahead and Save & Close and then we’ll go over there.

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.