If you are a business offering goods and/or services on credit to your customers, or allow for partial payments/payment deposits, then you should create and issue your customers Invoices. This will allow you to track your customers balances for Individual Invoices in the accounts receivables ledger , as well as have a comprehensive view of your total outstanding customer balances. The Invoice connects the sales transactions to accounts receivables; the sales receipt on the other hand, does not. If you require full payment at time of sale/service, then you should issue your customers Sales Receipts. Sales Receipts do not affect accounts receivables and thus will not allow for the tracking of any customer balances. Businesses, such as restaurants and beauty salons that operate on a “buy/now pay/now” basis, do not need to Invoice their customers since they will not need to track payments owing to them – there won’t be any. Instead, they should issue sales receipts which is for the total amount of the sale. Thanks to today’s technological advancement, these businesses have the option of using a Point of Sale system, and most can be linked to an accounting software such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, and have the transactions easily downloaded to QuickBooks instead of manually. So there you have it! Use an Invoice when you need to track customer balances, and a Sales receipt when you do not. If you are looking for reliable bookkeeping services in New York, we can help. APO Bookkeeping can provide one-time QuickBooks setup and training so that business owners can better understand their business finances. We can also do everything bookkeeping related for you. Check out our bookkeeping service packages and tell us what you think is best for your business. |
Thanks for always sharing useful information unlike a lot of other websites and blogs. You helped me to properly enter my employees ADP payroll in QuickBooks and I’ve been following you ever since and changing my way of doing things as I learn. Keep up the great work! We appreciate your efforts.
Hey 🙂 Thank you so much for this info! Now I know what I’ve been doing wrong.
I was giving myself too much work creating Invoices then applying payments when I could have created just a sales receipt for my customers who pay in full all the time. WOW! Nice share!!!
Oh no! So I’ve been wasting my time doing too much when I could be doing less?! You know what, let me go read some more of your pages and see what else I could be wasting my time doing. You have no idea how invaluable people like you are. Happy I found you now. BIG Thanks!
I found your QuickBooks Tutorial Blog about a month ago and you would be amazed at how much I was doing wrong and how much you’ve helped me to start doing it right. I owe you big time!!! Thanks 😃
Thank you so much for this info! I’ve been working at getting better with my books and this will definitely help with the Invoicing vs Sales Receipt aspect in QuickBooks. I invoice everything and as you’re showing me now, it’s a waste of time if there won’t be a balance.