Customize Invoices in QuickBooks Online for Finance with Ease

Customize invoices in quickbooks online for Finance

hey there this is Nick from income digs and today we're diving into the world of invoicing so if you're ever confused about what an invoice is how to create one or how to customize it and maximize its usefulness within QuickBooks Online you're in the right place we're going to go back to basics and we're going to talk about exactly how to do all that within QuickBooks Online specifically thinking about how to do this for those Real Estate Investors out there like me so getting into things here what we're going to talk about is just really generally what is in an invoice make sure we're on the same page as far as when you create an invoice what does that do to your books what does that do to your Revenue your balance sheet we're going to talk about our setup and how we want to have some things in place ahead of time to really save us time as we're creating these invoices we're going to look at the old versus the new invoice layouts within QuickBooks online so as of this recording QuickBooks Online is experimenting with a new layout so we're going to look at that versus the old way kind of bounce back and forth talk about pros and cons and we're going to ultimately save time with recurring transactions as well all right so this piece of software this feature within QuickBooks Online has come a long way in the last few years so we're going to dive in to make sure that you and your business are getting the absolute most out of it so let's get into QuickBooks and get right down to it so let's start with what is an invoice okay what is an invoice at its core an invoice is really us indicating that somebody owes us money okay so if I issue an invoice that's me saying that me and my business is owed money by somebody that's a customer it needs to be a customer out there so in the case of a real estate investor that can be a tenant right that can be a tenant who owes us money and what does that do to our reporting when we issue an invoice what an invoice does it's really specifically related to what's called accounts receivable so if we create an invoice basically we're going to say that our our Revenue goes up and our accounts receivable goes up so I'm going to go to a quick balance sheet which kind of has not much on it at all here and I'm just going to create a new invoice so we can see what happens this is in 2018 just so I can have kind of an empty set of books here I'm going to create an invoice just a random one almost um to to just show you exactly where it goes it it doesn't really even matter what this is for right now so don't pay attention to too much of the details other than I'm making in 2018 and I'm just going to put in something here really almost anything Property Management $115,000 whatever okay I'm going to save and close that and let's see what happens to my balance sheet and my income statement when I create that invoice so I just created an invoice and my accounts receivable increases to 15,000 my net income if I drill down into that has increased by 15,000 as well now this is me doing acral based accounting so this is saying that we're recognizing the transaction at the date of the invoice as opposed to when we get paid for it so that's acrel versus cash I personally love to run my business in AC cruel based accounting both from the revenue side of things and the expense side of things I like to recognize those transactions as of the date of either the invoice or in the expense side the bill it helps me to be a little bit more on top of my cash flow all right so we're recognizing revenue and then we're recognizing the accounts receivable as soon as I'm paid for this the funds are going to go from accounts receivable so I'm going to I'm going to kind of mock up a payment here I'm going to say that I received this money it got deposited into my checking account all right once I do this it's going to clear out my accounts receivable to zero and put that money in my checking account right up here so accounts receivable goes to zero checking account increases that's really the essence of what an invoice is so I want to make sure we're on the same page as far as that is concerned right invoice increases our accounts receivable once we get paid that accounts receivable goes down within QuickBooks Online we can manage all of our invoices right here I go to sales go to invoices this will show you all your open invoices is where you can create new ones all that cool stuff before we get into creating some invoices I want to go to the account and settings make sure that we're spending a little bit of time thinking about our invoices before we create them so let's go that there from accountant settings here and we'll go to sales and right here we got a whole bunch of stuff we can do with sales and invoices now it says sales form content that's mostly our invoices this also relates to estimates but generally speaking this is our our invoicing we're going to customize our look and feel in a second but let's just get into some of these specifics so your preferred invoice terms okay now when you create an invoice are you typically requesting that that money be paid immediately or are you giving your customers 15 30 60 days you can always change this on an individual invoice but you probably want to set this to be whatever is most common for you for me and my tenants they get invoice on the first of the month it's due on the first of the month they're rent shipping I'm not going to be using that uh for for my purposes for real estate investing if you're actually selling Goods you might might want to do that preferred delivery method send later makes sense you're going to be sending invoices typically emails going to be the way we're doing most of these things and then a few other things here custom transaction numbers I don't find a need for these but you could do this this would say that you can start your invoice numbering from a certain level I just use whatever defaults and QuickBooks online service dat's not a bad one I'm going to turn that on for now so we can see what that is that's basically saying the service I performed here's a date I performed it so if you're doing Property Management it makes sense if you're doing renovations for other folks it makes a lot of sense to have the actual date of that service on your invoice so that you know it's easier to track you could potentially offer a discount you could track deposits you could accept tips you could indicate tags as well so I'm going to turn these three off I'll keep tags on I don't use them too much but I like to have it available to me and I'll just click save here invoice payments if you're going to set up your payments and I recommend you do uh you're going to connect that right there okay so you're going to connect your bank accounts Etc products and services we're going to get into those in a little bit you want to turn on your products and services for sure here late feed this is a really cool thing this was added a few years ago where uh yeah we want to automatically add late fees especially if we're doing this for tenants uh the only small issue with this is there's not a ton of flexibility here meaning I can either do a flat fee or not I can't do like a flat fee plus a per day okay now you can do that manually on your invoices but you can't do it automatically here like we're seeing okay so I've set up a flat fee of 20 bucks per invoice starting with after a grace period and here too I can't even put it like a 2 3 four five or I can do a five so that's a little bit of an issue for me but you can always manually do the late fees beyond that you can do progress invoicing reminders great idea they used to not have this so you can automatically send reminders when invoices are due that's a really good idea all right um and then the other thing we want to look at is our our look and feel and I think this is important just to spend a little bit of time on to understand what the style of your invoice looks like if somebody were to print an invoice what does it look like this is a super easy editing tool where you can get into the template and you can pick one kind of pre-created as far as how it's going to look and then edit it from there so I got this one up here uh you can add your logo of course I recommend you do that small medium or large where it shows up left right center you can add your custom colors so you're going to take whatever your branding is makes a lot of sense right to use that um I just lost mine but there we go uh and then your fonts Etc all right your content this is important as well what shows up in there so I can click this and just edit you know your business name if I have my logo I probably don't need my business name on there you know it's your call phone number email and then just whatever you call your stuff as well your form numbers go ahead and spend some time thinking about this and customizing this you can always change it on a an invoice by invoice basis but it makes sense to have something standardized then the last piece that a lot of my students don't spend enough time on is thinking about when the email gets sent what does it look like what do I say to that recipient so when we send an invoice we're going to I always like to attach the PDF that's always a good idea all right this is what the subject's going to say new invoice from and then here's my invoice number greeting dear first name we appreciate your business all that stuff and then you can also customize your reminder emails and this is what the preview is going to look like all right so looking good generally speaking spend some time thinking about that now the other thing we have to think about is our products and services and this is basically what do we sell if you're a property manager you might just have Property Management if you're invoicing for rent you're going to want to spend some time uploading or adding your list of rents for each of your properties that you are renting out so this is 122 Buffalo Street Apartment B rent I've got a category for rent I sell it it's got a price and now when I create an invoice it'll come in there nice and neat for me let's do some invoicing let's see what this actually looks like I'm going to go to the invoicing section here I'm going to go to create an invoice I can do it from here I can do it from a customer there's a few different ways let's just click this button and I'm going to start with a customer now your customer in this case we're going to use a tenant okay so I have my tenant listed as Juliet and so Juliet is a tenant of 122 Buffalo Street so in this case I'm using a hierarchy where I have a customer of 122 Buffalo Street and then a sub customer or subtenant of Juliet that would help me to categorize and to group all of my outstanding invoices for that property in one place whether it's Juliet or other tenants of mine and what's cool is that prepopulates the email for that tenant and I again spend some time when you're uploading your list of customers make sure that email in there online payments I can decide if I want cards or bank transfer now I could have set that up during my settings I probably should I actually set this up on my own uh actual set of books to do bank transfer by default and cards is on a you know as requested basis and terms do on receipt which is defaulted again I can always change that on a per invoice basis but it's defaulting there because that's what I did with my settings here's my invoice date here's my due date late fees are currently off I can turn those on okay and those will only happen you know once it's overdue now the business in the class that's something specific for the way I've set up my books I am CL tracking multiple businesses within QuickBooks Online that's an advanced technique if you want to check that out we have a really detailed video on that same with class tracking I do want to in addition to I'm capturing you know the property here I like to capture it a second place as well if we can all right here's where that service date comes up so in this case it's rent which is it's applicable here I'm doing all this in the past 2018 okay there's my service date that's where I provided you the service of rent what service did I provide Juliet's in maybe Apartment B so 122 Buffalo Street Apartment B rent I pull that up pulls up the default rate my description is monthly rent okay and I can save that I can also save and send that let me just save it for now because I want to show you the updated layout okay so a lot of you are logging into QuickBooks Online you might be defaulting to the updated layout or you're clicking this button and wondering what it is I'm just going to spend a little bit of time with it the important thing to know here is this does not change any of the back end of the system and how invoicing works it's just the look and feel of this exact screen okay so QuickBooks gets some feedback that you know this screen is maybe not as intuitive as it should be maybe we need a refresh so they're trying out this updated layout I'm going to click this button to see what it looks like I'm going to click update this invoice now notice I saved first okay that was important so I saved that first although it didn't bring up any of my saving so that is interesting I didn't know it would do that so keep that in mind but let's just do it like we were doing before so there's Juliet comes up here and what this is doing is really it's almost like a preview it looks a little bit more like it will print okay it's the same information but it's just a little bit more like it's going to print so here's my apartment B Rent Now notice the service date is not in there that's in interesting to me this is all new to a lot of us too so we're kind of all trying this out together there's my 122 Buffalo Street now if your rate is there you can always change it if like the rate was increased or you had an agreement that we're paying more this month you can of course add more things as well to this but you can always change that you do want to set up in your in your um products and services your default though all right here's the payment stuff and it looks like we don't have any of that on uh yet now notice what we're seeing on the right hand side here is a lot of those customization options that I decided to turn on or off in the settings we can do it here on an individual invoice basis Okay so we can indicate you know whether we want to deposit a discount Etc so just because we set it up in the accountant settings to begin with does not mean that's how it's always has to be and here we have my automation as far as my reminders those look good we're going to talk about recurring invoices in a second yeah that looks pretty good let's save and send this and see what happens with it actually I'm just going to bounce over email view not available with this templ template that's interesting to me PDF view not either pay view okay this is looks like what they're going to get when they send it I'm going to actually send this to see what it looks like when we receive that email now it's giving me a preview notice it's bringing all this information in from our settings I'm going to send that invoice now creating the invoice and sending the invoice are two different actions so you have to be aware of that if you just create the invoice and they sit in your books great I have the accounts receivable but does your customer know about it do they know that they've been requested to pay here's my invoice right here if I'm the recipient I can grab this and see it okay and I have a nice neat button here now did it attach the PDF yes we clicked that button we wanted the PDF to attach that looks good interesting that that service date wasn't on that updated layout that's probably a little glitch that they're going to have to fix I'm going to go to review and pay and then this from the customer standpoint is where I can come and update you know my payment now this set of books doesn't have a payment acceptance set up yet so it's not going to work but this is what I would do as the customer okay so let's go into that invoice and the other thing I want to talk about is recurring invoices and just managing our whole setup when I come to invoices here I can see what what's overdue what's not due yet I can drill down into them by clicking on them as well so I can click on this drill down into it and see what's going on what's overdue and I can batch them and potentially send a reminder or send them again okay we already showed how to receive a payment kind of manually meaning they wrote you a check they pay some other method we can simply indicate that we've received that payment I'm going to just quickly go back to the old layout um actually let's see here so notice that these are overdue just last 12 months that's what this filter is doing I have this one way old so I'm just going to go um it's actually not going to show me at all will it um so I'm just going to go to the customer because these are so old I'm going to drill down into Juliet and then there's my list of transactions I'm just going to do all invoices all right we see those coming in here I got this invoice for 950 these are the two that I created one in the old view one in the new view let me go back to the old view for a second if you're in the new view and you don't like it you want to you know be back in the old way of doing things uh you just click this old layout button and it's going to bounce you back over there okay I'm going to click nothing on the feedback for now and this old layout might be just a little bit easier to work with maybe you're used to it that service date comes back up here let's talk about recurring invoices I want you to at least be open to this idea especially for tenants okay so make recurring is going to save you a ton of time for tenants who pay every single month so you can create your template so we can call it you know Juliet's monthly rent and this is a potentially confusing part but important how soon before do we create the invoice and I like to create my invoices about 10 days in advance what this means is that as we approach the first of the month let's say that we're approaching the 1 of April it's going to create and send this invoice okay on April 20th it's not due yet it's due on the 1st of April but the customer is going to get it the tenants going to get it and often they're going to pay it right away and it's a great way to kind of entice your tenants to pay early if they don't pay it right away that's no big deal they'll get the reminders after that first but I always like to create mine 10 days in advance who's the customer what's the email automatically send emails that's crucial include unbuild charges is another good idea we can track buildable expenses we have some videos on that and then they'll automatically be coming in here we're in a default to bank transfers coming in the interval monthly on the first day every 1 month this is the date of the invoice okay so even though we're going to create it 10 days in advance the date of the invoice is going to be right here on this interval if you know the lease is ending at a specific date you can set a due date here or an end date or you can stop it after you know 12 months 12 occurrences all right here's my billing address do on receipt you can default your business as well the one thing that's not going to really work for recurring invoices is a service date right so every single month it changes you'd probably leave it blank here maybe even take it off completely if you're doing recurring it's just not going to make any sense and the system won't automatically update it creating these saved invoices is a really good way to kind of automate your process I didn't save that one I'm just going to go to my list right here recurring transactions you can do this for invoicing you can do this as well for bills uh let me just do type so I have all these different invoices you can set up to automatically send to your tenants and this is just a really crucial piece of automating your entire system you set it up once it's recurring they're going to get it ahead of time hopefully pay ahead of time you got your reminder set up as well and then you build in a little part of your workflow you maybe got to go in there and nudge some people that aren't responding to the reminders send them a separate email or text or something that has to happen too that's what the accounts receivable portals for so you can see what's really hot what's overdue and what do we really got to focus on so that's really all about invoicing we talked about the old layout the new layout and how we can specifically set up these invoices so that they go out to our tenants so that we get paid it's the essential reason we're in business is that we make some money somewhere down the road if you like this video I encourage you to subscribe so that you're up to date on all the new videos that come out leave a comment leave a question I answer everything that comes through on YouTube also check out my in-depth course real estate accounting boot camp we go end to endend on the entire setup of QuickBooks Online for your real estate investing business so if you're an investor yourself or you're a bookkeeper working for an investor I encourage you to check that out in addition to all the free resources available at income.com I'm so glad you join me here on this video and I'll see you on the next one