What is a delayed charge? It’s a service event, not a transaction.

You you sometimes earn income but need to delay the delivery of an invoice to your customer? Is the charge for the service being delayed? The income was actually earned because work was done by your company, but balances have not yet been affected. A delayed charge is an event. It should not yet be recorded in the chart of accounts or in the customer’s records until it is billed.

Why would we use a delayed charge? Perhaps your work involves many several different service events in a single day. The customer doesn’t want to see a separate invoice for every single event in every single day. It’s simply too many invoices to process. It’s too much work for them and it’s too annoying. The client may want us to invoice them only once a month, or once a week, or some other schedule. If we are not invoicing the customer right away, we need the customer to sign some sort of document stating that the particular service was provided at the specified time. This becomes the source document that you as the bookkeeper uses to record the delayed charge.

When you have accumulated your events as delayed charges you can add them to an invoice. As delayed charges, they have no effect on the customer’s balance in the chart of accounts. When you open the New Invoice window you will see all of the delayed charges.

Delayed Charges will only appear in your Transaction List by Customer report.

Click + New, Delayed charge under the Customers column. It’s advisable to include some specific details in the Memo box in the bottom left. That text will appear in the Transaction List by Customer report in the Memo/Description column of the report.

Once you put a delayed charge on an invoice, it will no longer appear in the right panel when you choose the customer for future invoices. The only two ways to get them back to the panel is to delete the invoices that you put them on, or remove them from the invoice.

Reports

end of video 16…