When you bill your customers on a monthly basis, you can enter charges directly into the customer’s register through Statement Charges instead of creating individual invoices.
As you know, QuickBooks can create statements, summaries of a customer’s activity. These are generated automatically from the invoices, receipts, payments, and other transactions you’ve recorded over a given period of time.
Depending on what kind of business you have, you probably have a preferred way of billing customers. If they walk into your shop and present a credit card or cash, you create sales receipts. If they order off your website, they might receive an electronic receipt. Or your arrangement may be such that you send invoices.
There’s another way that’s especially useful if your customers are responsible for paying recurring charges, like an ongoing service contract that’s billed monthly. You can enter those financial obligations directly as statement charges.
How to create statement charge in Quickbooks.
- From the QuickBooks Home screen or the Customers menu, go to Statement Charges/Enter Statement Charges.
- Choose the customer job.Note: If the Customers & Jobs list shows more than one job for the customer, select the correct job. QuickBooks maintains a separate register for each job.
- (Optional) Change the date of the statement charge.
- Select the item.Note: When you select or add an item, the description and amount are automatically populated based on the description and unit cost entered when the item was set up. You can delete or modify this when creating invoices.
- Click Record at the bottom right of the register to save it.
Statement Charge Limitations
Before you decide to use statement charges, keep in mind that:
You can’t include some information that would appear on an invoice, like sales tax and discounts.
Even if your charge relates to hours you worked for the customer, QuickBooks will not open a reminder window containing that information the next time you create an invoice for the customer. You’d have to Enter Time by creating a single activity or entering the hours on a timesheet.
You still have to bill the customers.
Billing the Customer
There are two ways to bill customers for statement charges. You can generate statements that include the date(s) of the charge(s). The next time you create a statement for customers who have manually-entered statement charges, it will contain them, along with any other activity like invoices and payments. This means you’ll have to enter a statement charge every month if it’s to be a recurring one. Instead, you can treat them as memorized transactions, so they’re automatically entered in the register. If you’re billing multiple customers for the same service every month, for example, this would work well.
First, you’ll need to create a Group that contains all of those customers. Open the Lists menu and select Memorized Transaction List. Right-click anywhere on that screen and click on New Group. This box will open.
Give your Group a Name and click the button in front of Automate Transaction Entry. Open the list in the field next to How Often and select the billing interval. Choose the Next Date to indicate when this group billing should begin. If the charges should be entered on a limited basis, enter the Number Remaining. And be sure to fill in the Days In Advance To Enter if that’s applicable. Click OK.
Next, you’ll assign the customers who should be billed monthly to your Group. Click Statement Charges on the home page again to open your A/R register. Select each customer one at a time and right-click on the statement charge that you want to recur monthly, then select Memorize Stmt Charge. In the window that opens, give the transaction a new Name if you’d like (this will not affect the transaction, only how it’s listed). Click on the button in front of Add to Group and select the Group name from the drop-down list. Repeat for each customer you want to include.