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Do you know what’s more embarrassing than not charging your clients enough money? Not even getting paid. ??♀️
A couple of years ago when I was just starting out, I completely forgot to invoice a client and I didn’t end up getting paid because I was too embarrassed to let them know.
How to Create Recurring Invoices in Quickbooks
Let’s go ahead and create a recurring invoice from a new invoice.
I’m going to click on new, over here, click invoice, and we’re just going to fill this out. You’ll need to pick your customer or create a new one.
The invoice date auto-populates to today, which is good, and you can edit your payments and that kind of thing. Down here is where you’ll add in the product or service I’m just going to type in digital marketing, YouTube advertising, and we’re worth a lot. So we charge a lot. I’m just kidding, but this is fun to see. Now once you have all of this filled out, you can go ahead and click “make recurring.”
That takes you to this new window where you’ll have to fill out a couple more invoice details, such as the template name.
You can change this and call it monthly. Scheduled reminder or unscheduled. When you schedule recurring invoices, you’ll make show up every first day of the month or whatever date.
You can also set a reminder. So it’ll just email you and let you know that you need to create this or send it out. Unscheduled would be kind of, if you have projects, they get done on random dates, random timeframes, and you just want to be able to quickly create that invoice from this template. let’s go ahead and use scheduled I’ll say create two days in advance, just so I can have it in my account I’ll know it’s coming.
And then the customer we already have now here’s some options you have to decide on. You can automatically send the emails, which once this is created, it will automatically send it out to your client. I don’t generally do that because I like to look things over beforehand. I leave that unchecked. You can do print later. I don’t really print anything. So I leave that on checked and then include unbilled charges.
Unbilled charges would be, if you had like mileage or. Billable hours that haven’t been included in this invoice that are associated with this customer. I leave those off. Cause mine’s pretty straightforward. You can edit your online Quickbooks payments to include cards or just do a bank transfer. cards do come with an extra fee.
So I like to do a bank transfer first. And then if they come back and say, Hey, can I pay with a credit card? I’ll always turn that back on. Interval, you can set this up. You could do daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, and then you can pick the day. So if it’s on the fifth of the month or the second Tuesday of every month, you can pick any combination of that, that you need.
And then the start date we’ll have it as today and none, but you can do, a specific date or after six invoices are sent out that kind of thing. I’m going to keep it as none for this
billing address. You can update the terms to be net 15, net 30, or net 60. But I always use the “due on receipt” option. And then I really liked this feature, which is a reminder. this is how you would set to. Remind your client. you can remind them three days before it’s due on the due date or three days after it’s due or a combination of these.
I like to do on the due date, which is clearly why the email is being sent and then three days after the due date. So if they haven’t paid within three days, it sends them a reminder. Uh, that’s kind of the way I like to do it. So we’ll close that and leave this. You can now see that two reminders are on, you can add tags, but I don’t usually do that.
And then you can also add other services and whatnot. So let’s go down here and hit save template. All right. So this is now saved.
So now if we go into recurring transactions, you’ll see it listed right here. So this is the first one. There is no previous date because it has not been started yet. So, this is just the new template here. we can edit this hit start date monthly. Day five of every month. you can see in here, it’s just the next date is December 5th. That’s because we have it set to do the fifth day of every month, even though the start date is 11, 17, it’s a little confusing, but if you wanted to start today, you would need to change that to monthly on the seventh.
We’ll go ahead and see that template. So then it’ll show up here on the 17th, if you need to change this in the future, like say you started the work on the first, you’re invoicing them today and you want the next invoice to go out on the first. You can either wait to set up this invoice or you can come back in and edit this recurring invoice and change it to the first.
If you need to edit any of these recurring transactions you would do so from the car. Recurring transaction. That’ll bring up this screen and then you can just edit anything you need. You can pause some, say a client’s like holding off on something or they need to, put the project on hold for a little bit.
You can do that. You can duplicate it from here, which is really helpful. And this is what I’ve used in the past. You can also skip the next one.
You can delete it here or you can use it. And this will create a new invoice from this that you can send right now, which is.
The other thing I like to do just to cover my bases is that I like to BCC myself on all of these, just so I know that the email was officially sent and it’s good to go. I go down here and just take my email done. And now this is saved in the template there On top of that. I also like to create a Google calendar reminder. So I’ll say invoice, conversion, owl test, and you can add a specific time. And then I always do, p every month on the 17th done. And then I make them yellow. And just have the notification email me zero days before save.
So now every month this’ll show up on my calendar and it just reminds me that, if I’m looking at my week coming up, the invoice is going to go out. If I need to do anything before that goes out, like update some pricing or whatnot, I can do. From there, you can also set up notifications to come up a couple of days before just to check and make sure that the pricing is right.
if for some reason, QuickBooks decides that it’s not going to work for you that day, and you don’t remember that the invoice was supposed to go out. That kind of stinks. So I like to have that second layer, and remove any risk of it not going out.
Another cool feature is to set up. Defaults. what I mean by that is if you click on online payments, edit, and then go to here and click on the settings link, it’ll take you right to where I’m talking about. Or you can just navigate here from the settings menu, but here is where you can actually customize your invoices and how they go out. This is the one I have used recently.
You can add some more color here. If you want, change this up, make it brighter, blue, whatever color works with your brand. You can change fonts and all this good stuff. So I kind of just leave this here and just make sure you have your logo up there, but you can also change what actually shows so you can delete quantity, you delete the rate. It’s really customizable in here, which is kind of nice. And then this is what the email will. So it pulls that color from the invoice itself, you can update this and if you’ve seen any of my other videos, you know, that I love getting referrals from every email I’m sending.
So I always include something like this, just so they’re reminded that if they do send someone my way, I do offer a commission. You can always attach a PDF as well. You can play around with these and then you can edit the reminder email as well.
But from this menu, you can actually change, the invoice terms so that every time it comes up as net 30 or due on receipt, the preferred delivery method is like sent later non-print later. and all of these will automatically save every time you create a new invoice. So that’s super helpful to kind of streamline even just creating the recurring invoice template for you.
That’s how you create a recurring invoice from a new invoice. But what if you have an existing invoice that you want to create a recurring invoice from?
I’m going to go ahead and use this. Now we have this new invoice, right. And I’m going to change so you can see that it does actually create a new one. So I’ll change the amount to 50,000 and we’ll do make recurring. really just that simple.
now we have this setup. I can change these dates. You can have a different start date for tomorrow. Do you want sales receipts? All the same things that I saved in those defaults should show up here. Now we can save the template.
And now, if we go back into your recurring transactions, you will see this new one in here. So you can create this either from the new invoice or an existing invoice you’re already using. Let’s go ahead and use this one. And I’m going to show you what it looks like on the client’s end. I’m going to have this sent to myself, let’s save and send. This is what the invoice email should look like. You can update this in here, or in the settings, as I showed you before, you can also just copy a link and send it to them, but let’s go ahead and send this and close it.
And QuickBooks tries to sell you a bunch of things all the time. All right. I just went into my email and got this. Out for you so you can see what it looks like. Looks pretty, pretty dang, close to what the, uh, template showed before. Right? you can also create one of these from the recurring transactions window and just click on new and you’ll just change this over to invoice. And voila, there it is. So there are a couple of ways to kind of navigate to this, filling them out is all this.
Now the only difference between a sales receipt and an invoice is that the payment is automatically deducted from their account Now, obviously you want to get approval from your client. I would definitely get it in writing but down here, you’ll be able to include a credit card and you can enter the credit card details here.
You need the street address, zip code their name. If you’re in person, you can swipe the card or you can just enter the details here. And then every day on the first of the month, this will charge their card.
You’ll just fill out all the details here as well, save the template. And you can use that to automatically charge their card.
So those are two ways that you can make recurring invoices work in your QuickBooks account online. These can be used no matter what kind of Quickbooks account you have – Quickbooks online, self-employed or small business.
If you’re looking for more tips on how you can automate parts of your client onboarding and invoicing process, check out this video over here. I hope this is helpful for you. See you soon.