Quickbooks help: How to apply customer pay to multiple invoices

Thanks for

this

information

Hi Rebecca,

Your video speaks directly to my problem in an easy to follow way, I think. However, I don’t seem to experience the same results.

Selecting the customer name as you did doesn’t seem to bring up the list of open invoices (jobs) that are listed under that customer name. I can select any of the jobs individually but end up with credits rather than paid invoices.

Specifically, I have one customer with half a dozen “jobs” and 3 checks (payments) that equal the total outstanding balance. If I apply all the checks to the customer name the account balance (receivable) goes to zero for the customer in the customer list, but the individual invoice balances remain unpaid and don’t show in as income for the year, in a profit and loss report.

I seem to be only able to choose ONE invoice for each deposit. Since I know the totals are correct I’m forced to “pretend” that each invoice was paid in full with one check in order to get a correct income total.

This seems like QB isn’t acting right, but experience tells me that I’m probably missing something obvious. Does that sound correct (or even make sense)? Thanks for any help.

—David

David-

Question: You have customers and jobs assigned to those customers? When you invoice, do you make an invoice to a specific job, and then receive payment to that specific job? Initially, it sounds as if you are receiving payments without assigning them to a job.

And, it’s weird that the invoices aren’t going to the profit and loss. Do you have items set up for products or services you sell? Look at the service/product items to make sure the account is an INCOME account (Like “Sales”). That’s the way Quickbooks determines where on the Profit and Loss or Balance sheet that the invoice amount will show up.

Please clarify, and I’ll respond.

Rebecca

Thanks for your response Rebecca. I apologize in advance for this rather lengthy response. I’m attempting to avoid confusing shorthand. (Here’s a step by step description of what I believe I’m doing using the same terminology as QB uses (hopefully). Clearly I’m out of my element here, so there’s a real danger of my misstatement)

I’m a graphic designer so my sales are primarily for services. First I create an estimate, turn it into an invoice where line items are for income accounts (specific activities), i.e. research, design, production, etc.

Expanding my previous example the customer/client is, “XYZ” Consulting Company for whom I initially produced a brochure (Job–A).

The project eventually expanded into various other items which were invoiced separately (Jobs–B,–C,–D, etc.).

I received an initial deposit for a portion of the brochure. When the final invoice went out it for Job–A, invoices for several other jobs were also sent and all were paid with one check.

When all work was complete several other invoices were paid with a final check. In preparing my taxes I received a 1099 from the client in excess of the total income shown in my report, alerting me to the problem. Their 1099 was correct. My QB report was wrong (less), except for the initial deposit against the invoice for Job–A, which showed a correct balance for that invoice.

There now seems to be no “correct” way to assign further payments to all the associated invoices in the way shown in your video, and which seems like the logical procedure to me.

Most of my jobs are singular in nature. New or recurring customers contract for projects which are usually invoiced separately and paid per invoice. The Receive Payment window will show the balance for the job which matches the payment amount. The balance is zero. Case theoretically closed.

In this case the payment checks were just deposited and left the details for later…which has now arrived.

As part of this process I found a couple of other payments that were directly deposited and learned how to delete them and reenter them using the correct “Receive Payment” method, but this one has me stumped. Unfortunately this kind of thing erodes my confidence in the entire process/software/system and really doesn’t do that much for my sanity.

I wonder if I can easily set up a second simple (dummy) company to test my methods and/or see if what I’m doing works on someone else’s system.

David-

Yes, you can setup several companies on Quickbooks. If you want, say “open new company” and setup a company similar to yours to try out a whole process. Also, there are sample companies in the Quickbooks file.

Instead of opening your company, “cancel” and a screen will come up that has a button that says “open a sample file”. There is even a sample graphics company there. I suggest going in there and doing your process from beginning to end several times to get it to work properly.

If you’ve deposited payments through the “make deposits” window, you’ll have to delete them, receive them against the proper job invoices through the “receive payments” screen, and redeposit them using the “make deposits” function.

Is this clear? I have thought of making a video that shows how to fix this type of problem….

Rebecca

Yes, very clear. Thank you Rebecca for all your help. The problem seems to be with either this version of QB or compatibility with my current system. The problem probably happened at some time when my system was upgraded but wasn’t noticed by me until now. Your suggestion to open a “sample file” in QB confirmed that the program wasn’t performing as it should. Great suggestion!

In case it will help someone else save some frustration. I was using QB Pro for Mac 2006 and OS X 10.4.11.
Downloading a trial version of QB Pro for Mac 2010 (which required a system upgrade to OS X 10.5 and above, naturally) and running the same sample file proved to solve the problem of applying a single payment to multiple invoices.

I had been especially loath to upgrade QB because Intuit doesn’t even support their own products sufficiently to allow TurboTax to import QB files directly, and apparently still doesn’t. Go figure!

According to the TurboTax 2009 site. “QuickBooks data cannot be imported into TurboTax Online or TurboTax desktop software for Mac.” I really don’t know what they’re thinking! I’ll need to investigate if it might be a good time to switch to another company’s products.

Thanks again, Rebecca, for your generous, clear, and concise expertise. I’m sure you’re an asset to your customers there in Michigan!

David-

Uggghhh…you are using QB for Mac! I agree….I’ve had problems with QB for Mac in the past. Have never had the same problems with the Windows version. Not sure why the Mac version is so different. However, if you wanted to try something different, I believe you can do QB Online from your Mac.

Also, I don’t only serve local clients…I have online clients:)

Thanks so much for the compliment…I appreciate it! Anytime you have a question I can post a video about, let me know.

Rebecca

Good to know. Only Tervo World Headquarters are located in Michigan. You go girl!

Thanks again, David

Thanks for reading. I really appreciate your comments:)