Arcadia

QuickBooks Helps You Make a Statement

How do you let customers know they owe you money? Probably by sending
invoices. And if your customers are conscientious and pay on time, that might be
all you need.

But it might be helpful to do at least part of your billing by dispatching
statements. These forms do have their drawbacks. For example, you can’t include
sales tax or discounts on them; you can’t group related charges and subtotal
them; and your customization options are weaker than in invoices.

Still, statements could be a good choice for you if you’re billing on a
regular basis for services, or when a client has built up numerous charges, some
of which are past due. Statements lay out the customer’s current financial
obligation to you, including finance charges, should you choose to impose
them.

Outline the charges

To get started, click on the Statement Charges icon on the
desktop. (If there’s no icon and you want one, click Edit |
Preferences, then Desktop View | Company
Preferences, then click in the box next to Statements and
Statement Charges.) Or you can just click Customers | Enter
Statement Charges.

Figure 1: Click on Edit | Preferences to add
Statement Charges and Statements icons to your
desktop.

The customer register opens. Select the customer you want to create a charge
for by clicking the down arrow next to Customer: Job. If
you are in the middle of more than one job for the customer, make sure you make
the correct one active.

Go down to the first blank line and change the date if necessary. Tab to the
Item field, and drop the list to select the relevant product or
service. Tab and enter the Quantity. The Rate
and Amt Chrg should be filled in (if not, go back to
Lists | Item List and edit the record). QuickBooks will have
entered STMTCHG in the Type field. Tab to the
Description field and complete it if it’s blank, and select a
Class if you’d like. Your window will look something like
this:

Figure 2: It’s very easy to enter statement charges in
QuickBooks.

If you have another charge for that job, go ahead and enter it. When
you’re done with charges for that job, click Record.

Build a statement

When you’ve entered all of the charges, you can easily convert them to
statements. From the Home page, click on the Statements icon.
This window opens:

Figure 3: You’ll select options from this window when you’re building a
statement run.

If the window contains an A/R field, that means that you have more than one
receivables account. Be sure to select the appropriate one. Verify, too, that
the date is correct. This will appear in the customer’s register as the
Billed Date.

Here, too, you can choose a range of transaction dates for your statement(s),
or simply opt to create forms for all customers with open transactions (in the
latter case, you can limit it to transactions that are more than 30 days past
due). You must also indicate whether you want statements sent to all customers
or a subset. You can manually choose one or many customers, or select by
Type (commercial, residential) or Preferred Send Method
(E-mail or Mail).

QuickBooks gives you some control over your statements’ layout; click
Customize if you want to explore this. Next, you can indicate
whether you want to create one statement per customer or per job. The other
options here are self-explanatory, but be sure to go through them every time you
create statements.

Another decision

Will you be wanting to assess finance charges on the past due charges? This
is a decision you may want to talk over with us. It’s a complex issue. Should
you want to do so, though, clicking on Assess Finance Charges
will open the Assess Finance Charges window.

When you’re satisfied with your choices, you can Preview
your statements. Here’s an example:

Figure 4: Statements lay out all transaction activity within a given
period.

Statements don’t take over the role of invoices, but they can be an effective
way to let your customers – and you – get a comprehensive view of their
financial interaction with you.

If you’re still unclear on how these forms can fit into your accounting
workflow, contact our office.