We often invoice companies for 50% up front of the grand total of an invoice and then the remaining 50% on delivery, how would I show this using QuickFile’s invoices?
It may be best to make two separate invoices and maybe write in text a note on the first to say it represents 50% of the total cost with balance to be invoiced after delivery (or just leave the terms to the quotation/estimate template). Set your quotation/estimate template up with the terms so there is no surprise for any customer. The quotation/estimate would then be for the full amount with a note saying 50% is due up front. When they accept the quotation, bill them with the first 50% invoice. Do the job. Then bill them with a second invoice. If you put everything on one invoice, you get into complexity with tax point dates and when money is due, etc, but up to you (you can tag partial payments against an invoice).
Thanks for your advice. The one thing that I’m getting confused on though is would the balance due on both of those invoices be for the full amount or is there any way to show 50% of the total in balance due. So if the job total is 2k would I be making the balance due on invoice #1 2k but with a note to say only 50% of that is due and then invoice #2 would also be for 2K with a note asking for the remaining 50%. If I did it this way would all my records be incorrect because essentially the job total has become 4k?
I would handle two invoices completely separately. Establish the quotation for the full amount and terms of payment. I don’t like the use of the word ‘estimate’ so the first thing I did was change that to ‘quotation’ (it depends on the nature of your business which is better). You can find info on that if you search the help. The quotation would be the only thing with the 100% cost. Create the first invoice with a value of 50%. If you like, mention that this is 50% of x total amount in text in the description field, but you could just reference the quotation instead (or if you wanted to be really unhelpful to your customer, don’t reference anything!). It’s the fact they accept your quotation (with 100%) that matters. Then create a second invoice for the balance of the job after delivery. For your accounts, you then just have two invoices, each for 50% of the total job.
As I said, alternatively, you could invoice just once, for the full amount, and then send a ‘statement’ (i.e. a prod to pay the balance) after the job which would show the outstanding 50% (by then they have already paid 50% hopefully), but their second 50% would then look like a late payment and, personally, I wouldn’t want that. But I guess you could do it that way.
Thanks, your first way sounds like the way to do it. But how do I get the balance due box to show 50% of the actual total. If I am listing each item with its unit cost and qty etc then unless I work out what 50% of that unit cost should be and enter that (which obviously i dont want to do because it is not a true reflection of the unit cost) then I am going to end up with the balance due box showing the full amount aren’t i? I was just wondering whether there is anything that I can do to get that balance due box to automatically show 50% of the total?
Ah, you didn’t mention the invoice needs to be itemised. If you need each item to be itemised as true cost on the invoice then I can’t really see any other way than option 2. If you didn’t have to have the items itemised at true cost individually on an invoice then you could do option 1 and have the first invoice purely as ‘advance payment ref xxx quotation’ and the second invoice itemising the items but at 50% true cost. It all depends how/if you use QF for stock value tracking or whether different items on the invoice belong to different accounts; we don’t use it for stock tracking at all because I think it would be no good for a manufacturer like us. Maybe for retail, you could use it to track stock but it’s things like this that make it difficult. It may be feasible to somehow use the ‘discount’ option when making an invoice but you would have to change the word ‘discount’ as it is not a discount you want to apply. Also, I guess any stock tracking would show double stock sales. There might be a way to use the ‘Paid to date’ entry where you itemise everything on the second invoice at full cost, and enter the 50% up front payment from the first invoice (one liner) or credit note as ‘paid to date’. Maybe search for ‘Paid to date’ in the help.
We try to itemise things on invoices when we can but if we had to do something like you are doing, we would convert things to ‘kits’. By this I mean have a one line invoice with total cost (or %) for the ‘kit re quote xxx’ and then keep a separate record of what’s in that particular kit in the quotation where things are fully itemised along with total cost. If there was something like ‘delivery charge’ that you wanted on a different account to all the items being sold, I would probably just take the delivery charge from the total, split the remaining goods cost over the two invoices and put the delivery charge back on as a separate line on the second invoice (so that it registers correctly in the ‘delivery charge’ account.) If you are selling things that need to be recorded on lots of different accounts then I’m not sure what to do. We keep a separate spreadsheet for all our work orders as QF is simply not capable of efficiently storing or showing the type of details we want to see or track. We don’t bother with the Item column on the invoice, perhaps we could, but I can’t see it helping us as we have all sales on a spreadsheet anyway as a result of having to keep an order book.
We came from spreadsheets and QF means we no longer need to keep purchase spreadsheets or overhead spreadsheets, etc, but we still need to keep our sales spreadsheet as this, essentially, is our order book. Therefore, we don’t care about itemisation in QF. So long as the total amounts are correct, everything is in order.
Hopefully someone else has a better idea and there is a simple way for you.
Thank you very much for that mate, I appreciate your effort. I think I’m going to rethink our need to actually itemise everything in the invoices when we have already done so in a quote, we’ve just always done it because our first ever client requested it but maybe we didn’t even provide an itemised quote back then and that’s why they requested it and it is just something that has stuck - I dont think we any real need to do so now and that would allow us to do your suggestion of ‘advance payment ref xxx quotation’ on invoice 1 and then just a line on the second invoice for the remaining 50%, plus if any additional things come up during the job we can just add them to the second invoice below that 50% line.
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