Adding billable time and cost to an invoice

In earlier movies you learned how to track billable time and flag different types of expenses as billable to your customers. If you recorded those billable items in QuickBooks, you want to make sure that you invoice your customers for them, or you won't make as much money as you're supposed to. QuickBooks makes it easy to add billable time and cost to the invoices you create. In fact when you choose a customer or job with outstanding billable time and cost it reminds you that those items are out there.

If you use QuickBooks Premier and turn on the preference to create invoices from a list of time and expenses, you can invoice for time and costs more directly. On the Edit menu, click Preferences. Scroll down to the Time & Expense category and then click the Company Preference tab. Turn on the Create Invoices from a list of Time & Expenses checkbox and then click OK. Now on the Homepage, clicking the invoices icon displays a shortcut menu with two commands, with the Invoice for Time & Expense of command you can create invoices for Time and reimbursable costs.

You can also create a batch of invoices for all the customers with billable time and costs. You do that by turning on the checkbox for each customer in the invoice for Time & Expenses window. However, if you use QuickBooks Pro or don't turn on that Preference, the Homepage has the Create invoices icon, which directly opens the create invoices window. Here I am going to click Create Invoices and the Create Invoices window opens. In the Customer Job dropdown list select the customer to invoice.

Water Way Homes in this example. If you have outstanding billable time and/or costs, the Billable Time/Costs dialog box appears, QuickBooks selects the Select outstanding billable time and cost to add to the invoice option. So you can click OK to continue to add billable items to the invoice. If you want to skip the billable stuff for now, you can select the other option and click OK.

When you choose to add outstanding time and costs, the Choose billable times and costs dialog box opens. This dialog box has tabs for each type of billable cost. Time, expenses, mileage and items. The time tab is the one you see first. If you have billable time for the customer or job, each timed activity appears in the table. If you want to add all the billable time, just click Select All. QuickBooks turns on all the check marks for the time entries.

You can also click the check marks cell to toggle a line on or off. You can't change the amount of time or the rate in this dialog box, you have to wait until you add the time to the invoice to do that, you can tell QuickBooks how you want the time to appear on the invoice. To do that click Options. In the options for transferring billable time dialog box, QuickBooks selects the option that puts each activity on a separate line which is great when your customer wants to know the nitty gritty of the work performed.

Select one of the sub options to tell QuickBooks to show item descriptions, the notes to add about the work performed during timed activities, or both. On the other hand, to keep the invoice more concise you can select the combine activities with the same service items option. So each service item appears on the invoice only once. Then click OK to close that dialog box. To add billable expenses such as work performed by a subcontractor or telephone calls, click the Expenses tab.

Click Select All to add all the billable expenses. If you pass expenses through at cost you don't have to worry about the markup fields. However, if you add a little extra on to billable expenses you can type a dollar amount or percentage in the markup amount or percent box. For example, to add a 10% markup, type 10%. Choose the account you use to track markup. An income account called something like markup income.

The amount shows the original amount for the charge. The total expenses with markup number shows the total of all the expenses with the markup applied. If the expenses are taxable, turn on the selected expenses or taxable checkbox. If you use more than one markup percentage you can and expenses with different markups. You add all the expenses with one markup and click OK to add them to the invoice, then you click Add time and costs to reopen the Choose Billable Time and Costs dialog box and add more expenses with the different markup.

If you charge for mileage, click the mileage tab. As you do on the other tabs, you can click Select All to add all the billable mileage. The options button lets you show each mileage entry separately or combined as you can do with the time entries. But in this case there is no mileage to add. For products that you buy for a customer or job click the Items tab, click Select All to add all the items or click check marks cells to toggle items on or off. QuickBooks fills in the rate and the amount for the item records.

Regardless of which tab you display the total billable time and cost value is a total of everything you select on all the tabs. If you want to add everything as one single line on the invoice, turn on the print selected time and cost as one invoice item checkbox. You will see separate entries in the Create Invoices window so you can make sure everything is correct. But the printed or emailed invoice will have only one line. Click OK to add the expenses to the invoice.

After you add the billable time and expenses to the invoice you can still add additional lines to the invoice if necessary. QuickBooks calculates the sales tax for any taxable items. When you are done, click Save & Close to save the invoice and close the dialog box. To make sure that you don't forget any billable costs, run the unbilled costs by job report from time to time. On the Reports menu point to customers and receivables and then choose unbilled costs by job and you can see here the report is empty so I've invoiced for all of them.

The invoices that you create with billable time and costs are just like the others you create, you still have to print them or email them to your customers.