Master QuickBooks Invoicing to Get Paid Faster

In today's video, we are going to cover setting up your products and services. This is going to get you ready for invoicing out of QuickBooks. So let's go ahead and dive right in. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go up to our settings and look at products and services. You can see here in my default account, I already have some products and services set up. If you have similar product and services already set up, then be very careful about what you're using. If you have already set this up before and maybe you didn't know what you were doing, you can go ahead and edit the existing one. But I would be very cautious about doing that because if you go in and change something that will already has income posted to it, you're really changing the entire history of your financials. So if you use this product or service from two years ago and you're trying to repurpose it, it's probably not a good idea to do that. So I would really caution from taking that step. I would just go ahead and create a new product and service so that way you know, you have a clean history. So we're going to go up to the top of this. We're going to set up new and we are going to select what kind of account this is. So we are going to select service and I am going to put in Rental Income and I'm going to put Property A. Since this series is geared towards real estate, that's what I'm going to keep this at and Income and Services. So this is just a requirement that you have to have to create invoices in QuickBooks. This here is basically going to map what you want this service to on your profit and loss statement. So if we click on this, we can see the different accounts that we can select from here. You wanted this to show up as other income. Every single time you create an invoice and select Rental Income Property A, it is going to get mapped to to our Other income account on our P and L. And in my case, I don't really want that. I want to start from scratch. I want a service to be called Rental Income Property A and I also want an account to be called Rental Income Property A. That is just a personal preference for me. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it. That's just the way I like to set things up. So I'm going to exit out of this and I'm going to go find our chart of accounts. So I'm going to create a new chart of accounts and I'm going to literally paste this in and we are going to call this income because that's what we're trying to do right now. So this is going to be a service or fee income and I'm just going to create that account right there. So now if we search that account, we are going to see this rental income account. So you can't just create an invoice and then map it to this account. I wish you could, but for some reason it doesn't allow you to in QuickBooks. And I've seen a lot of people get this wrong when they are setting up their account. They map an income account, then they think that they can go ahead and use that account in their invoice and. And things just get really messed up from an accounting perspective. So I definitely would recommend following the steps that we're taking here. So we're going to go to products and services now we're going to go back to new service. I'm going to paste that account in and what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste that in and I'm going to look for that account that I had set up. And it looks like when we go here, it's not showing up. So what I'm actually going to do. This could very well be a QuickBooks bug. I'm going to go ahead and refresh the page. So if that happens to you, let's go ahead and try this again. Let's go new. I'm going to paste that in. And there it is. So now that you see, it looks like when we created the account, the browser did not update with those changes from the QuickBooks backend. So we just had to refresh the page and now it's showing up. So that's a very common problem that you may very well have. So now that you know how to solve that, so I'm going to go ahead and hit save and close. Pretty simple. We created a service called Rental Income Property A and now we have that mapped to an income account called Rental Income Property A. Now this is going to help me in the future, not get confused as far as what I'm doing when I'm creating invoices. So I'm going to hit skip that. We don't have a sales tax rate for this. All right, so now if we look down here, we are going to see Rental Income Property A as a product and service. And for some reason it looks like this was marked as taxable. So I want to make sure that that is not taxable. I'm going to select non taxable there. So. So go ahead and correct that. Now we are good because this is a service. There is no tax that we're going to be paying on this service. Okay. So now after we've set that up, we're going to go ahead and create our first invoice. But before we do that, we have to have an actual customer. So we're going to go to customers, we're going to type in new customer and we're going to type in tenant A. Again, this would be replaced with whatever your customer needs to be. I would go ahead and put in the address. So one thing that I've seen recently is if you Decide to use QuickBooks payment processing, you're going to need to have this information or a deposit could actually get held and QuickBooks won't process the payment if it's missing this information. So what I had recently found out I ran into this issue with a client is because the street address wasn't populated, it got held back by Intuit. So we're going to put in this 1234 street address and I'm going to put Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. We want to put in their email tenantatest.com again, obviously this is not real information. All right, cool. Now we got all that information that we need. Go ahead and save that. And now we're ready to create our first invoice. So you can do that by creating a invoice here. You can also go to the sales section and go to invoices and create an invoice from here. Or you can also go to new and create an invoice from here. So now I'm going to create an invoice from scratch. Tenant A, I'm going to select that. And when we get to products and services, we are going to select that new product and service that we just set up. Again, this is looks like that populate twice. Again we're going to select that product and service that we had just set up up. All right, so to recap what we talked about here today, we went through how to set up your product and services and then we discussed linking them to your chart of accounts and those corresponding income accounts. So that way when you create an invoice, that product and service that you select within that invoice gets mapped to the appropriate income account. So when you are looking at your profit and loss statement, you see see exactly what you're expecting to see. All right. See you next time. So go ahead and like and subscribe below. I promise you, you're going to want to stay tuned for this full accounting series that we're going to put on for you. At the end of it, you're going to know exactly how to record income and expenses, and you're probably going to be better than your average bookkeeper by time. We're done. See you next time.