Invoicing customers

You can create a new blank invoice or create an invoice directly from an estimate. To create a new blank invoice, simply double-click Create Invoices. This is going to bring you up a standard invoice. Now, any existing invoices you can see, will show up on the left hand side. And you can filter those out by company or by date. If you select an existing invoice, you can click on it, the invoice will show up and you can see the summary on the right hand side.

To create a new invoice from here, simply click the plus sign next to create invoice on the left hand side. So the first thing you need to do is decide who is the invoice for. From the pull-down menu, select your customer It'll auto populate the bill to address based on what you already had on their customer profile. Though you can change that at anytime. It also defaults to the next incremental invoice number and again you can change that too. You can change the terms for that customer, by clicking the pull down and now you can start line iteming your items for that invoice.

Click your mouse in the item field. From the pull down menu you'll see all the products and services that you set up in the item and service list. So now you can select one, it will auto populate the description and the price, and you can change those too. You can change the rate and you can either click your mouse in the other field or hit the Tab key to get to the next field. I can enter any quantity, the amount will automatically get adjusted.

And I can keep hitting the Tab key to move on to another line. So if you like to use the keyboard, this is a great feature to quickly enter items. I can adjust the quantity for anything I want. Hit the Tab key, and now I can come down to the bottom and select a customer message. This is something that I had selected in the customer profile. Now, if this customer is liable for tax, I need to choose tax from the bottom. And I can also click this button down on the bottom that specifies whether or not this customer is taxable.

The bottom will tell me what the balance due is, but there is one more thing that I want to show you. If I decided anytime that I don't want a line from this invoice, I can use the right mouse button and choose delete line. I can then add more products, and if I wanted to separate all my products from my services, I can add a subtotal. For example, I can right click and choose insert subtotal line. Now a subtotal is something that you have to set up before you can use it, so click the Set-up button now.

What you need to do is change the type to subtotal and then you can change the item name, I would keep it at subtotal, and then click the blue OK button. We've now created a subtotal of our product, and I can come down here and add another service based item. Once I've got my invoice all done, I can then click save. And that then opens a new blank one, you'll notice the number is now an incremental number against the last number that I put in.

But I'm going to come over here and click the invoice, because we created it but we didn't do anything with it yet. There is a few things that we can do. The first thing we need to do is decide what template we are going to use for this invoice. It defaults to the standard professional template, but there is a few that I can change it to. There is a standard service invoice and product invoice. It changes slightly almost, and in the service invoice it will add up here field. And on the product invoice, it will let other fields such as ship dates and ship via.

Now you can preview how this is going to look when you send it to the client at any time by clicking the eye icon next to the template. It's going to switch around and it'll give you a view of what it will look like if you either print it out on paper, or this is what it will look like as a pdf file if you email it. Click the eye to back to the invoice to work on it. You can even send out a packing slip, by selecting standard packing slip. If I hit the Preview button, I can then see that the titles changed and it looks a little bit different.

Now once you've got your invoice selected and you've got the template you want, you need to decide whether you want to print it or email it. You can print it immediately by clicking the Print icon, you can also email it immediately by clicking Email this Invoice Now. It's going to come up with a bunch of words as part of a template and you can change this if you want. If you click Send, I'm going to click Cancel because I don't want send it, but it'll open it up in your default email program that have on that computer.

And it will sent it out, now you can also decide whether or not you want to email or print this as a badge later, maybe at the end of the day once you've done all your transactions. So you can click any of these buttons at the bottom, such as email at later or print at later. You can also choose to do both. When your happy with your changes click Save you can close out of the invoice field and when your ready to batch print everything, you can select File either Print Forms or Email Forms.

So that's how easy it is to work with all your invoices. Up next I'm going to show you how to create progress invoicing.