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Quickbooks estimate template for Purchasing

hi everybody I'm Hector Garcia CPA and advanced QuickBooks Pro advisor in this video I would like to talk to you about the estimates and invoice experience in QuickBooks Online this is probably one of the most common reasons why people get into QuickBooks Online in the first place is because they want to send estimates and invoices to their customers Now to create an estimate or an invoice we're going to click on the new button on the left hand side we're going to click on new and then click on under customers invoice or estimate now the invoice and estimate are different they look and feels probably close to identical but they're different because um the estimate is a non-posting transaction which means you can create a gazillion estimates and it's not going to affect your accounting in any way shape or form the purpose of an estimate is so you can give your client a quote for a service you're going to perform or a product you're going to sell then the client can at that point uh confirm that approve it or decline it and then from there we'll start the workflow for you to create an invoice from that estimate now keep in mind that you do not have to create an estimate prior to doing an invoice you can go straight to invoice if your business doesn't create estimates I'm going to show you both uh because a lot of businesses do start from the estimate now the first thing you're going to see on the top left uh left you're going to see your company name your address your contact information if you click on the link that says Ed edit company it will open a drawer on the right hand side and this is where you can change the company name the contact information if you have something a misspelled in your address or something like that you can kind of fix that on the fly so that's the first thing you're going to do on the top left if you have not uploaded a logo into your QuickBooks Online file this is the time to do that so here on the top right there's a link that says add logo you can click on that and then go search for logo inside your uh computer so after you uploaded your logo it should be there on the top right of the screen now we're going to scroll a little bit down and we're going to see the next option here which is ADD customer you are required to add a customer when creating an estimate or an invoice without that you won't be able to have that if you already have customers in your database when you click on the drop- down menu all your customers and projects in your database are going to be listed in there this is a brand new QuickBooks file so I don't have any customers so I'm going to create my new customer on the fly when when I click on add new I see the drawer on the right hand side where I can add my customer either by name or by company name so let's say this customer is called ABC uh customer and then I can put their contact information their email their phone number you are going to need to put a cell phone number here on mobile number if you want to text the invoice to your client we'll discuss that a little bit later on and you're going to want to put an email of course if you want to uh send the estimate or the invoice uh to your client via email there's all the information about the client you can put here so let's put an address so we'll put 101 Elm Street Miami Florida 33333 and then uh there's all sorts of other things you can add customer notes attachments if you have a contract with your client uh preferred payment uh method preferred payment terms all this information that's going to be right there on this right hand drawer so I'm just going to click on save so my uh customer information gets loaded in there now you will notice that there's a build to and a ship to address there's actually a setting in QuickBooks where you can turn off the ship to address if you're not shipping something to them because that would be confusing there's additional Fields here like ship via a shipping date tracking number these things can be removed as well if you don't use any of them but if you are you're going to use them of course you can enter whatever information you want to put in there now a SC a little bit down let's say you want to change something uh from the customer profile you can click on edit customer just so you can click on edit company the right hand side drawer opens up and then you have access to all of your customers information when you click here on the manage button and you click on customization this is where you can choose what you want to see in here so if I don't want to see the ship to address if I don't want to see the estimate status so you can see the stuff over here if I don't want to see the estimate number if I don't want to see the estimate date the expiration date all of these things can be uh completely controlled uh based on what you want to use now these two bottom ones service date and skew those are going to be driven towards the actual content or the lines uh of the estimate itself the one this on the top of uh service dat and and um and skew these are all from the top or the header uh of of the estimate now there's also the ability to add custom Fields QuickBooks Online Simple Start Essentials or plus allows you to add up to three custom fields and QuickBooks in advance allows like 50 custom Fields so if you're going to be very very much into creating custom fields for the header section of your estimate or invoice you might want to think about working on Qbo a QuickBooks Online advance so if I click here it says manage and I click on that click leave without saving it will take me to my custom Fields menu where I create all my custom Fields so if I can click here where it says add custom field and again you get up to three custom fields on the lower versions of QuickBooks and you get a whole bunch more on the advanced Edition so let's say I I'm going to have a custom field for let's say the county that the client is in you know maybe this is some internal information that we're tracking so I'm going to click on all sales forms because I want to track the county of the customer and this is manual information we're going to track and then I can choose whether or not I want this to print or to to show in the estimate or the invoice so we click here says save and there's my custom field created again you can create up to three on the lower versions of QuickBooks and a whole lot more on the advanced edition let's go back here to the estimate and we're going to click on the drop down menu here and click on customer so we load that customer information again and then here under County we can put here Miami dat County or whatever information that's related to the customer for that particular sale now we have here location it says hidden uh location is for you to track uh sales or expenses by a specific Department inside your organization maybe a specific cost center now locations are only available in the plus Edition or Advanced editions of QuickBooks online if you if you happen to have multiple locations you can click on add new and track multiple locations for now we're going to leave this out for this particular transaction but these are sort of the way you can conf configure the header part of the the estimate you can also uh manage tags just so you can manage custom Fields here on the manage tags we'll skip that I have a whole different video in my YouTube channel that actually focuses on tags locations and something else called class which we'll discuss a little bit later on now let's talk about the products and services uh section this is where we can create multiple lines so the first thing we're going to see is the service date so if you are providing a service and you want to tell your customer the invoice or the estimate is for uh June 5th but this service is estimated that it's going to be done maybe uh June 27 so it's a way to track you know the estimate date versus when we think we're going to provide the service on the drop- down menu you have a couple of options here you have hours late fee Services these are all created by QuickBooks uh uh by default you can create a whole bunch of products and services on your own by clicking on add new um I won't go over this I have an entirely different video in my YouTube channel that talks about all the types of products and services you can create including inventory different conversation but let's just work within the context of the um services are available now so let's say we're going to go here into ours and then we're going to here under description we're going to put uh service client computer on site or something like that so let's say that's what we do for living we service computers on site and then we can put here a quantity so let's say we're charging six hours so we'll put six and then on the rate let's say we charge $60 an hour and then I hit Tab and then it does the math so there it is $360 simple math now you can add one more thing here if you want to so we can do maybe date this for July 31st and then here under service we can put here uh follow up uh call or something like that and maybe we can charge a flat fee of $100 under quantity if I put zero and even if I put 100 the sum or the math will be zero if I remove the zero then QuickBooks assumes it's a one that's kind of an interesting piece of this whole thing now once I create my lines I can actually click on this little plus sign and add more lines if I want to I can also click and drag these and change them in order so if I wanted to present any of these in any particular order I can do that I can also create um subtotal so for example I can click here on ADD subtotal and I will subtotal these two amounts the $460 I'm going to close the um this right drawer here so I get a little bit more real estate so here's my total and then I can put a description I can put here total uh services and let's say for example we're also going to sell a product or something like that so I'm going to do add new and I said I wasn't going to cover creating new products and services but it's might as well let me create a non-inventory item and then we're just going to call this uh cables and I'll go ahead and under income account I'm going to change this to sales of product income again this whole section is going to be covered in a in a whole different video I just kind of want to focus on the estimate and the invoice presentation so let's say we have uh cables here and let's say we're going to charge $27 worth of cables and um and then we also have a column here for class which is similar to location so if you wanted to track different dimensions of data for your reports you can also track classes again classes locations only available in the plus and advanced editions of uh QuickBooks online and I have a different video that explains these two plus tags and how they compare so for now we'll leave them out I'm just showing you that they where they are so you understand what to expect when you turn on these features that you're going to see these things in your estimates then we're going to scroll down and then we have uh customer payment options so if you have activated your payments which means you're allowing customers to pay you via credit card via Paypal via venmo VIA a uh via just any most of the direct Bank payments even Apple pay you can actually enable through a service called QuickBooks payments uh if you haven't enabled that you can click on activate payments and go through the workflow and it takes you through the application this is a credit application they are going to check your business credit and your personal credit as the owner to make sure that you don't have any bankruptcies or any uh financial problems where uh QuickBooks would feel it's a risk uh to do that now one thing I do want to add is if you haven't done that yet actually um uh send me an email and I will connect you with my payments guide inside QuickBooks that actually gives you better rate so when you click on activate payments I just want to a quick context here and you click here says C rates it would actually tell you what is it that they're currently charging to allow customers to pay you electronically now these rates are going to be better when you purchase them through the what what QuickBooks calls the QuickBook solution provider channel the reseller Channel and part of the reseller channel so again if you already created it that's fine it should be working if you haven't created it yet just email me and they'll create it for you and they'll give you basically the same rate I get um as a reseller so something to think about it's going to be very small but over time it's going to add up anyway um so just wanted to do a quick plug for that okay so then we have um uh notes so tell your customer how would you like to get paid and I could say something like I must pay 50% to get started um if you pay via credit card uh we will add a 3% fee or something like that now I know that adding something like this could be an issue because some states actually prohibit the use of that and some Merchant uh providers prohibit that I'm just using an example of what I get to see in tons of estimates and tons invoices from people now not to customer we can say uh something like we would love to do business with you and uh here on the memo on statement this is hidden and it will not show up on your estimate but it will show up on the statement so here's just information you have where you can add additional notes keep in mind that here in the description you could also add additional notes so how you want this to be presented is going to be up to you now if there's a sales tax component to this and this is why it could be useful to separate uh your total Services versus your products because you know maybe you're going to want to make it very clear clear that services are non taxable but the products are taxable that sort of thing um so that's why I like having this sub the subtotal option here under products or Services because it makes it easier for the customer to understand when there's sales tax involved now sales tax is not set up in this company file if I wanted to set up sales tax I would click on setup and it's going to take me through a whole sales tax workflow I have like a 25 minute video where I explain sales taxs in depth in my YouTube channel again I'll put all the links to all the videos I'm discussing in the description section I just don't want to get off track here now if you're going to provide a client a discount of sorts uh you can put here uh 10% or whatever or you can actually click on the dollar sign toggle and then just give them a flat discount so if you wanted to let's say just take away $87 to make it $400 flat you can do that now here it says edit totals this is where you can choose here on the on the right hand side what you want to add here in the totals now I can click on the manage button click on that and hide that but if I go back and click on edit totals just so you know it opens that and here the discount and fees this is where you can choose what kind of information you want to see here in the bottom so if I uncheck estimate total it removes that if I uncheck discount it removes the ability to do discounts if I want to add a shipping fee click on shipping fee and I can add a $10 shipping let's say I'm going to overnight the cable to the client or something like that that and I want the shipping to be separate you could always add shipping to a line here that's you know you would have to literally create go into the drop down menu go to add new and create a line for shipping which could be useful if you want to control kind of where those shipping fees are going in your profit and loss report especially if you got different types of shipping and you want to track you know the revenue for that but here's just an option to show it very uh separate from everything else and if you do multicurrency you can click here and set multicurrency this going to be a whole different video discussing multicurrency so we'll collapse that we'll go back into customization just to make sure you know uh just to reiterate all the things we can remove from here for example let's say if we're not tracking skew and we just have a dead colum there that's just going to confuse the customer remove it right so like the idea to get paid quickly is never confuse your customers right always be as detailed as possible you can put here USB uh cables required for job or something like that okay um so again I just emphasize be as descriptive as possible make it very clear to your customer what is it that you're selling them and then the last thing to look at here is under design when we click on the drop down menu we're going to be on the modern view that's where everybody needs to be this standard is for the old QuickBooks files I have a carryover from the old um estimate and invoice EXP experience I recommend avoiding that because they're going to remove that and some of your files may not even have that option may just have modern in there now if you want to change the color scheme we can click here and pick the different color scheme typically people will use a color scheme that kind of matches uh your logo or your company colors up to you that part is totally 100% uh personal uh preference and then you have a couple of font options here not so many I wish there was a little bit more font options but you can pick can choose what funds you want to see so now that I'm I'm done creating my estimate I can now save it so I'm going to click on the save button here on the bottom I can also let's just hit yes here and I can also click on the drop down menu under save and I can do save and new if I want to continuously create more estimates or save and close if I kind of want to move on and go to the next thing now here on the right hand side we're going to see things like review and send and in the drop- down menu we're going to see convert to invoice and copy to purchase order there's also share link if you click on share link you're going to get a um a URL that allows you to see that estimate digitally online so anyone could just click on that link and see that estimate now you are required to track your customer's email uh so actually we're going to click okay and let's go in here and click on enter customer email we're going to put here ABC gmail.com then we're going to click here it says review or let's just start with share a link so you can see so click on Save and then there's a link so if I actually click on this link or copy this link and then go to the direct URL it gives you a preview of what is it that customers are going to see it's exactly what they're going to see when you email them the invoice this is a a portal per se and your customer can actually accept or decline this uh estimate digitally which I love right cuz it basically makes the whole process uh very digital now here it says view estimate I can click on view estimate and then I can see the breakdown here of what the pdf version of this looks like so um so when you when your customer prints it it's exactly what it looks like and look at the not to customer we would love to do business with you let's go to instead of doing a a review and send let's go up here next to edit click on email View and and see what this looks like and it says the email message will go here uh review and approve that's the link that would take you to the other experience that we saw and then the PDF view is um a a preview of what it looks like printed so so now we're going to do review and send see what our workflow looks like and then we're going to go into a screen that is going to show me uh basically an email preview so here's the email preview dear customer here's your s subit you can change the subject line you can change the email you can choose to send yourself a copy always a good thing keep a copy of that here you see all your uh information it says the email message you'll write will go here this means that this email message goes in there that's exactly what that means here in the drop down menu I have send a new and then I just have send estimate which you just literally just email that estimate to uh to the customer so that's the entire um estimate workflow there really isn't much to do um from a estimate creation standpoint let's talk about the next steps okay so my estimate is created my customer has approved the estimate let me go back into the estimate here and then I'm going to click on here on the manage button so I see the the drawer and you see here where it says pending scent that's the status of the estimate if your client digitally clicks on accept or decline you're actually going to see accepted or decline now you can manually if the client calls you and says done let's do it then you can manually change it yourself so I can click I can go from pending to accepted click on Save and now that's officially an accepted estimate that means that this estimate could be now converted into an invoice okay so then the conversion process would look like this right so the customer approves the estimate I click on convert to invoice from the estimate and then uh let me click on yes here then the invoice is going to get created now I turned on a feature called progress invoicing and progress invoicing will give you uh three choices total of all estimate lines if you don't have progress invoice turn on it just go straight to that option and then you have percentage or amount and manual entry for each line now I'm going to do an entirely different video focused on progress invoicing so we're going to skip progress invoicing and just go to the default option which which is just duplicate the estimate into an invoice so we're going to click on create invoice and then the invoice gets created for you automatically everything gets pre-filled you don't have to do the work again uh here on the right hand side you get to see that there's a link there's a linkage from the from the estimate into the invoice so you know that it's two transactions that are sort of related to each other here where says link transactions if I click on that I see the list of all the estimat that is linked to and I can remove destroy or break that linking if there's an error then in here I can change things so the service date changes or the invoice date changes so let's say this invoice was completed on the 27th and then this is the really important part is how many days I'm going to give my customers to pay me so if I say do 15 days 15 days after the 27th so July 12th the invoice will officially be late now if the invoice is late you can choose uh for QuickBooks to add the late charge for you automatically or you just letting the client know hey you better pay me now you can get paid immediately if you click on terms do on receipt you have the option to communicate to your client that they have to pay you immediately and that's it in a nutshell notice that you have uh note to customer you have internal customer notes so this is an interesting one that's hidden note so we can say uh this customer was a paa uh don't deal with them again or something like that so that's just me kind of like letting the other QuickBooks users in my team know hey if you're looking at this invoice forget about this customer it was a pain in the butt don't do business with them again internal note customers will never see that then we have memo on statement then we have a note to customer and then we have tell your customer how you want to get paid again I'm kind of stuck in you know what happens when uh when I put something here uh I'm going to put here things a lot okay and uh and then here it says attachments you can add an attachment so I can click on attachment I can add any document a PDF a picture whatever I can add that in there and then when I email this to my customer I have the option to click uh attach to email then my customer will actually literally get the same attachment on the email we sent so maybe we have a sign document maybe we have a contract maybe we have a pict of the final work that we did or a checklist or whatever like different businesses work in different ways now we're going to click here on the manage button so we can open that drawer on the right hand side and then talk about the other options that we have so under customization identical to the estimates same checkboxes we can remove so we can remove ship to and that sort of thing if I want to uh payment options this is as we mentioned once you have turned on payments then you get to choose I want my customer to pay me with this type of payment or not I want this customer to only send me a check I want this customer to only pay me via banking right so I get to choose exactly um how I want to get paid once I enabled that payments account here at the bottom we can also choose what this foot looks like so we have the invoice total we have whether or not there was a deposit um so if you wanted to add an inline deposit where the customer let's say pay me a 100 bucks the day that I got there but they're going to pay me the rest later in the future something like that you can track and then again shipping fee then we have we discuss late fees so I have it configured so after a 30-day grace period QuickBooks will automatically add $25 late feed to that that's actually pretty cool under design identical to the estimates we have our modern view we have the colors we can uh we can have and the font under scheduling you get to do a couple of really interesting things one you can make the invoice recurring so if you're trying to uh have monthly services or something like that you can click on this little checkbox and it will take you to the recurring screen then we have more options so if you wanted to cue this to be printed let's say at the end of the month you print all these invoices in one shot to then uh put them stuff it in an envelope and send them to your clients that's where you would do that let's say for example you only email invoices on Fridays you can click on send later and then queue it up for or uh an email when you want to email it I personally like to email things immediately but every business has its own workflow only way the same the the own particular way that they want to work then we have invoice reminders so you get to choose whether or not you want QuickBooks to automatically email your client just nud them hey you know we have an invoice doing three days hey the invoice is due now hey uh you know you haven't paid the invoice it was due three days ago so you get get to choose how you want to do this and what's really cool is when you click on manage you can 100% uh manage this experience you can personalize this experience so when you go into the settings and you go down to uh I believe it's messages is it messages or actually reminders there we go you can actually pick how you want this reminder so here it says default email message for reminders click on the drop down menu and I can actually say look this is the actual message that I want my customers to see when I send them that Notch reminder and I can turn on the me the the first reminder and I can choose look do it seven days before it's due and then I can turn on let's say the middle reminder and I can do on the due date right and then I have the late reminder which I can do you know maybe not three days but maybe 14 days after it's due so you get complete control but not complete control but you got a couple of options here on when you want to set those reminder so we're going to click on Save uh done save that setting go back to the previous stab with the invoices and then when I go back into the invoice these days will change because we changed that in the setting now these are Global options so they they um they are they same across the board to all customers it would be really cool if you can customize this experience like some customers get reminded three days before 3 days after some customers 15 days before 15 days after or 14 days whatever that would be cool if you could do that but right now it's just a global setting it says it right there it applies to all outstanding invoices all customers in the future now customer reports this is pretty cool so if you're like looking at an invoice and you want to quickly see an open invoices report or an all transactions report you can quickly do that you know based on customer feedback people want to see reports contextually while looking at invoices now here on the print and download simple it just creates a a PDF of the of the invoice so if you want to print it or manually attach it or whatever there it is you see exactly what that looks like see this one does show uh the payment instructions so it looks like the payment instructions just don't show natively in estimates but they do show in invoices which kind of makes sense because invoices are to receive a payment and an estimate is not so just kind of keep that in mind that in the estimate level uh the payment instructions don't show so you got to put that in the to customer section as we covered earlier and you can print from here then we have a save button here we can do a save a new save and close or just a plain save and then on the right hand side we have review and send and then we have the drop down menu we have a receive F payment this is after you invoice you receive a payment and you can also share the link if you want to see that link uh that we covered earlier uh when it comes to seeing what that looks like so we'll click on done open a new tab let's paste that link in there so we can kind of see what the invoice looks like and here we go and your customer will see this now because uh the digital uh payments feature hasn't been turned on um it says here hey uh we haven't uh yet have a mechanism for your customers to pay you digitally so your customers actually can click on yes let them know and essentially QuickBooks will email you and say hey your customers want to pay you digitally you haven't turned on pay pays yet uh in really wants um their small businesses to get paid through their payment system so they can charge their fees and there's another Revenue model for them but it's very convenient right you're creating the invoice you're creating a mechanism for the customer to pay you it just makes sense here on the right hand side customer can see summary information they can click on view invoice view that PDF they can click on download the PDF or print the invoice they can see here uh your contact information as well so this is exactly what your customer is going to get when they click on that invoice that on that email that they get for the invoice and that essentially is it once you save um the invoice then at this point you can do the next actions and then once you're looking at an invoice here under manage you're going to see an actions button when you click on actions this is where you get all the different options so you can receive a payment you can duplicate the invoice you can delete the invoice you can void the invoice you can look at the audit history of multiple people in your firm Are editing the invoice you can see that in there and you can look at the transaction Journal which is really cool so the transaction Journal essentially opens up a report per se that shows you the accounting guts of that invoice so if you want to see that invoice from the context of debits and credits so we see here accounts receivable being debited 487 and we have our services income account being uh credited 360 Services being credited $100 and then we have this sales or product income for the cables $27 so you see very clearly what is the accounting consequences of running a uh of creating an invoice as I mentioned earlier the estimates don't uh don't post into your accounting invoices do okay and that's kind of like how it works so we uh we can go back into the invoice we can click on the little magnifying glass which is showing me my recent transactions and there's my estimate and there is my invoice and that's it in a nutshell um I have another video that talks about the accounts receivable workflow accounts receivable workflow it's about what comes next we create an invoice we receive a payment we want to make adjustment to an invoice or write off an invoice we'll do um credit memo if you want to skip invoices and pay payments as two separate transactions we can do sales receipt if we want to issue a refund on a sales receipt we can refund receipt if you want to add some charges or credits to a future invoice you can use delayed credit and delayed charge I cover all those things in my AR um uh workflow video for QuickBooks online so hopefully this was uh useful to you now you understand the estimate experience and the invoice experience and hopefully like you can get started with creating estimates and invoices for your customers with that being said I hope you enjoyed this video any questions you have go down in the comment section I'll try to answer those questions I'll try to create the next video that you like that I get suggestions in the comment section and and also additionally subscribe to the channel and um share it with your friends and colleagues and in the description you're going to see links to all the other vide I mentioned earlier thank you and I'll see you in the next one