Recurring Billing with Quickbooks 

I know I typically blog here about .NET and DotNetNuke, but I have been fielding more and more questions via e-mail about how I manage my business.  So it was with that, and a recent question that I had of my own that I might try making a few business related posts here.  If there ends up being interest, I will continue with some general business items, otherwise, we will just go back to the regular scheduled programming!

Now, on to the issue at hand, when running a business such as mine, it is very common to have "recurring" invoices.  Say for hosting or support items that may be monthly, quarterly or yearly.  Up until now I have been using a crude system to remember, and honestly it hasn't been all that effective.  Having Quickbooks I figured there would be a way of doing it, but for the life of me I couldn't remember.  So I posted out to Twitter to see if anyone had recommendations, and in literally 5 minutes @BrandonHaynes responded with the perfect solution, and that is what I explain below.

Memorized Transactions

Throughout QuickBooks you typically see a "Memorize" button, it is there for reports, and many other items.  However, when creating invoices you don't typically see it.  Well, there is an option to "Memorize Invoice", it is available from the "Edit" menu, or you can simply press CTRL + M.  This is the key to being able to setup QuickBooks to remind you of the recurring payments that you must invoice for.

So with the invoice that we need to setup on a recurring basis we can enable this option, and we will be presented with the following screen.

QB Memorize Transaction

From here we can control exactly how Quickbooks will remind us of the transaction.  On the left we can set it up to remind us or automatically enter it for us. We also create a unique name for the transaction.  On the right side you can select the frequency and the next date for the transaction.  Then simply hit "Ok" to memorize the transaction.

Conclusion

I just thought that this would be a very helpful tip for fellow business owners out there, as I know just how much time goes into managing invoices and customers.  And the more efficient we can be on that front, the better we can be at serving our customers!  Be sure to share your thoughts below, including if you would like to see more business related posts here as well.

Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tags: Business
 

Comments

Aging Safely’s web hosting relies on reoccurring invoices for quarterly billing. When I started using QuickBooks I asked a bookkeeper who explain all about memorized invoices in QB. She recommended that I use it.

I found it to be a real pain in the butt, for several reasons:
+ If you ever looked at the memorized invoice it immediately pushed the due date out one period, so you missed send the invoice out for a quarter,
+ If you changed your items or prices, the invoice had the old ones memorized.

After a while I found a different way to deal with my subscription-like service:
+ I created a $0.01 item that was a reminder that this customer needed to be re-invoiced, with print invoice checked and the date being the 20th of the month before it was due.
+ On the 20th of each month I create a real invoice for the customer and move the date on the reminder out 3 months.

Now I am free to change item names and prices and can see which customers need invoicing at any time without the problems of the memorized invoice.

It would be really nice if QB understood the needs of a subscription-like business. I also would like to find a way to send out overdue notices and record the fact that they have been sent out. Statements don’t really work well for this,

By David Snow on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 11:29 PM

i have been trying to figure out how to memorize bills on quickbooks for months, thank you for making my work so much esier :)

By Nikki on Monday, September 28, 2009 at 12:13 PM

Thanks for the nice post, I have been using memorized invoicing for some time now, it has been very effective for billing clients on a per month basis, however when I switched things for my client to a Quarterly basis billing, it became a real pain, couple of reasons, first I had requests from clients that they would like to get only 1 invoice that would show the breakdown of the months for that quarter, (ie. jan/feb/march) and second I wanted to set out to save some paper instead of printing 3 invoices for that client and mail it out for each of the months. I guess this is where I am still stuck currently, like I said I ultimately would like to send only 1 invoice but have that invoice reflect the quarterly months, and then I would like to make that a memorized transaction, in my mind every memorized transaction would would be different to relate to that quarter of the year(i hope this is making sense, this is a very small comment box to respond too..hehe and it looks cluttered to me) Really it would be an advanced option that a simple script would do a great job of setting up, if only QB allowed scripting..boo hiss! Please email me at callcory@shaw.ca if you have any suggestions for me, it would make me a happy guy and my printer would be forever grreatful to you!!!

Cheers!

Cory

By Cory on Monday, March 01, 2010 at 11:28 AM

Thanks! That was very helpful.

By Tasha on Tuesday, April 05, 2011 at 12:38 AM

ON: print form > print invoices "enter"
a widow opens to select the invoices, mine shows nothing to print.. ??????

By robert on Monday, August 15, 2011 at 4:18 PM

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