Sometimes you may have an invoice that you need to send to multiple customers. Perhaps it is monthly bookkeeping or payroll clients. Perhaps you need to invoice hundreds of home owners for their dues, students for a dance class each month, or customers for weekly lawn service. There are numerous examples of when you may need to send an invoice to multiple customers. In the past, you could memorize the invoice, but you still had to enter, save and then memorize the invoice. That could be very time consuming when there are lots of invoices.
The ability to create batch invoices is a new feature in QuickBooks Pro 2011, QuickBooks Premier 2011 and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 11.0. The batch invoice feature helps streamline workflow by offering a new tool that allows invoices containing the same items, services, and charges to be created in a batch instead of individually. This is a real time saver for companies who provide services on a recurring basis. You can access this new tool in the Customers menu > Create Batch Invoices as shown in the image below.
The Batch Invoicing tool is very easy to use–simply select the customers you want to include in a single batch invoice process. You can then create a Billing Group, a list of customers or customer-jobs that all share the same invoice line items and amounts when invoiced. This allows you to invoice a group of customers as needed. For example, you may have a group you invoice for dues monthly, quarterly or annually. Alternatively, create groups for different members like beginners, intermediate and advanced. You can set up the Billing Groups to make batch invoicing even more efficient.
After selecting your group (step 1), you enter the items for the invoice (step 2) and then create all the invoices at one time (step 3). The invoices will be marked to print or email based on the details specified for each specific customer or job record as shown in the image below. If the Preferred Send Method is email, then an email address must be entered (on the Customer Address tab) for the invoice to be marked ‘To be Sent’.
After you create the batch invoices, you can conveniently click to print and email the invoices to customers as shown in the image below.
Make sure to include a preferred send method and email address (if applicable) in the Customer Center prior to creating batch invoices.
I think Batch Invoicing in QuickBooks 2011 is a great new feature to help us save time and improve our efficiency.