While many small businesses use invoices to bill their customers, times may pop up when you wish to send statements to them instead. Information from your company file in QuickBooks will help you to create invoices through a simple and fast process. Better yet, you will not need to add any more data in order to complete this task.
Sometimes business owners prefer to create statements and invoices together, sending them to their customers at the same time. Statements are appropriate for use when you wish to create a form that lists the customer’s open charges, have customers who accrue multiple charges before you bill them, have customers who make advance or regular payments or if you want a more detailed log of your customer’s payment history, including his or her charges, payments and current balance.
Additionally, you may wish to send customers reminder statements to let them know about any recent payments and charges due. If a customer disputes a charge, you may wish to create a statement to remind him or her of the payments that are currently due.
In order to create a statement, you do not need to enter any additional data. Simply click on “Customers” menu and then on the “Create Statements” window. QuickBooks gives you a great deal of flexibility in creating your statements. You can choose the date range from which you wish to pull data. Alternatively, you can request a statement for all customers who currently have open transactions as of a statement date that you specify. You can also select to create statements for customers who are past due by a certain number of days. You can also isolate certain customers, such as by selecting a certain type of customer. You can opt to print statements per each customer or per job.
If you need to enter individual charges, you will have to use customer registers, which are located under the “Customers” menu. Select “Enter Statement Charges” or highlight a customer of your choosing. Then, click on the down arrow to enter a new transaction. Templates are available to help the process be even easier for small business owners. Preview your statements before you print or email them.
While statements do provide a great deal of flexibility, there are certain limitations on their use. For example, you will have to create an invoice in order to obtain a subtotal for several related charges. Statements do not include tax, discounts or payment items. Even though you can customize some material, you cannot add a custom field to the statements or a specific message like you can with other QuickBooks’ features.