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Progress invoice example for Technology Industry

QuickBooks Online 2023 progress invoicing overview the problem progress invoicing solves get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023 support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website Broken Out by category further Broken Out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page we also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it here we are in our QuickBooks online test company file we started up in a prior presentation we also have open in a separate incognito window the free sample company file if you want the two open at the same time we suggest using incognito window which you can open open if using Google Chrome by selecting the three dots in the browser new incognito window then typing into the search engine QuickBooks online test drive looking for the option that has intuit.com in the URL because Intuit is the owner of QuickBooks the sample company being useful because it allows us to test things out in the sample company while not distorting the data in our test company file as we work through a practice problem it's also useful to toggle back and forth between the accounting and business view in our example the test file will be in the accounting view the sample company will be in the business view if you want to toggle between the two views you can go to the Cog up top and switch the view down below now we want to think about progress invoicing which obviously has something to do with an invoice invoices being found in the new new button there is our invoice the form typically used the form usually sent out to clients and customers to request payment usually to request payment for work that was done in the past however anytime we are requesting payment whether it be for work done in the past work currently being done or work that will be done in the future it's tempting to use an invoice because the invoice is the form that's easiest to convert to actually receiving the payment it's the best form for requesting a payment the problem comes up that it might not line up with our Revenue recognition Concepts and principles and that's what we have to kind of look at and consider when we think about the problem of progress invoicing now if you do progress invoicing you need to turn on progress invoicing you can do that by going to the Cog up top we go into our settings on the left hand side we're going to go into the sales Tab and then scroll down to the progress invoicing it's not generally on by default so you got to toggle the progress invoicing on and then say save and then we're going to say done now normally the process when you have a progress invoicing type of system will be that you're going to be entering an estimate and then you're going to be basically billing for part of that estimate uh in the in the future and that's going to be setting up your progress invoicing structure so let's just think about the accrual kind of problems where the progress invoicing system the actual progress invoicing tool and QuickBooks is quite straightforward and easy to use however the concepts from accounting that they come into play as to why you need to use that system get more complex so let's think about when you might need a progress inventory kind of uh progress invoicing system wants to jump on over to a flowchart now this flowchart is just a screenshot of the QuickBooks desktop home page we're using QuickBooks online but this has a nice float chart and we just want to think about the normal flow of the forms and when and what type of accounting system and what kind of business a progress invoicing tool might be used so we're focused on the revenue sales accounts receivable or customer cycle at the end of that cycle we usually expect to receive money our checking account going up for goods and services that we provided now if you have a very easy kind of system you just do gig work or something like that then we might be able to just record Revenue with a deposit form possibly with the bank feeds when we receive payment but you can only do that if you're in the kind of industry that will lend itself to that easy kind of system or we might have a cash register type of situation in which case we would be thinking of like a create sales receipt type of form which basically records the transaction when it happens so if you have a restaurant or something like that then you're going to be recording the sale when it happens the work has been performed at the same point in time that you got paid and usually you can't just use the bank feeds to record the deposits in that system because you're going to have to collect all the payments for the day and then group them together by credit card payments or cash payments and then make a deposit into the bank then we have a system where we're going to have to invoice the clients normally when we invoice the clients it's because we're going to do the work first and then we're going to be invoicing the client and we're going to get paid at a future point in time so we're forced to do that by the industry so if we're in a law firm or an accounting firm the industry usually dictates that we do the work first we might have to track hours or what we actually did so that we can then build the client and and then when we build a client the invoice will increase accounts receivable the other side will go to to revenue and then the the invoice will also hopefully make the facilitation of the receipt of the payment as easy as possible so the client can then pay us and then when we get paid we reduce accounts receivable and either put it into the bank or we put it into undeposited funds and then we make the deposit so that's a normal invoicing process where we do the work first and oftentimes it's one of the job cost kind of system A specialized type of system where we where you don't know exactly what we're selling right because it's it's not all the same in nature there's some customization involved in it now then when you get to longer term projects when you get to bigger projects then oftentimes you're going to make an estimate so I'm going to make an estimate of what I think it's going to cost I don't really know because maybe it's a construction progress or or maybe it's a legal a legal issue that's going to take a long time or accounting issue or a tax thing that's going to take a long time so we'll make an estimate and then uh we're gonna invoice after we do the work oftentimes but if it's going to be a long-term process we're going to be doing construction for example for many months is the classic example but it could also be in a legal case it's going to take a long time so therefore we we might have to bill kind of as we go for this one kind of issue and like a job cost type of system same for like a tax type of system so in that case the question is I'm going to possibly be invoicing as I go so now I'm going to be requesting payments even though the job is not completed so we have a revenue recognition problem the invoice is a great tool for us to basically collect money from the customer because the invoice can be sent out and it's the easiest tool to convert the invoice to receipt of the payment but if you've got a longer term job then the question is should you be recording Revenue at the point time that you issue the invoice because you haven't actually completed the job or in some cases you might actually be be requesting money before you start the job as a down payment on the on the job so so we have this couple things that we need to be tracking one is the invoice is a good tool to request payment so we can track payment of the money the invoice requesting payment easy facilitation of the payment to be converted to to uh to cash and we track the accounts receivable so that we can follow up on the payments that have not yet been received with the invoice but then we have the revenue recognition issue if the invoice was sent out for for work that had been done in the past uh then then we should recognize the revenue on an accrual concept basis when we issue the invoice and that's normal and that will work perfectly but if we're not going to do the work until the future or we are currently doing the work then the idea would be well maybe we we shouldn't be recognizing the revenue at the point in time we send out the invoice because we haven't yet we haven't yet done the work we haven't completed the job which is usually what needs to be done for Revenue recognition principle so those are the concepts that that come into play with the progress invoicing we have we have the issue of I'd like to use the invoice to collect the money but collecting the money could be separate from uh the revenue the revenue recognition Concepts so we'll take a look at a couple kind of examples you can also have a situation where maybe you did the work in the past but they're going to be paying you like in installment kind of situations now if they're going to be paying you like in installments again you'd kind of like to set it up as as a loan type of situation however using progress invoicing can be can be useful because then you'd like to use the invoice to request the payments on a periodic type of basis even though the revenue recognition becomes kind of an issue that way because in in that case you did the work already you've already done the work and then you're going to be paid uh in in like installments in the future if you just record the invoice the revenue is going to be recognized when you get when you get paid as opposed to kind of when you did the work which you've already which you've already done the work so you've got these issues this invoice is great for collecting Revenue but you've got a difference between the revenue recognition concept and uh and the billing time so generally what's going to happen with the invoice is you're going to go up top and and we're going to make an estimate and then once once we have the estimate we can basically uh enter the invoice to pull in from the estimate so I'll just show an example here and then I will delete it so it doesn't get in the way of our practice problem so you don't have to enter this on your side if you don't want to but I'm just going to say we have an estimate and let's make a new customer I'm going to say it's customer one I just made up a customer customer one and this happens on 427.23 okay and then down below I'm going to say that we have let's just keep it with the hours and we'll put 100 000 on the hours and there's going to be our estimate so I'm going to say save and close so that doesn't actually record uh anything to the financial statements it's just an estimate so if the estimate is accepted then we might bill you know the client an invoice for the estimate so then when I invoice what's going to happen is I'll get this option so I can say invoice customer number one and now I've got this option pulling in from the estimate so I'm going to say I want to pull that information in and then I've got my choices on how I want to pull it and I can pull in the entire estimate but if I'm doing a progress invoicing type of system I might do some percentages so we might have come up with an agreement prior to this that I'm going to be charging you based on the based on the percent here so I Then I then might use the percent method or I might use some kind of custom field custom amount for each line item so the percent might be fairly common if I told them that I'm going to be billing them 30 percent or whatever then I can pull this information 30 percent and every time the invoice comes up I can then I can then pull in the next percent going forward until we've completely build out the estimate now the issue of course here is that when I record this transaction what's going to happen is it's going to record Revenue at that point in time and accounts receivable and then if the question is is it proper for me to record that 30 000 of Revenue because I may not have completed the job and if you have a long-term job even under an accrual concept sometimes there's deviations from the normal Revenue recognition principle which is that we don't record Revenue until the job's done but if you have a long construction job or something like that we might move to a percentage of completion kind of concept for example so that we can recognize a portion of the revenue basically as we go and that's some of the issues that we'll get into in future presentations