Do you give credits to customers that are conditional upon future purchases? This is a delayed credit. When we apply a delayed credit it lowers the money amount and item quantity of an invoice. You cannot simply enter a credit memo because you cannot reduce the amount until the purchase is actually made. It is conditional.

In QuickBooks we click + New, Delayed Credit. We choose the customer and put the quantity of hours of service and the service type. Note that this is not a transaction until it is placed on an invoice. Therefore, what is the only report that will show this delayed credit (after we save it but before we put it on an invoice)? Transaction List by Customer.

If you open a saved invoice (prior invoice), the delayed credit you just made will not show up in the side panel. How do you get around this? You must make a new invoice. The invoice will have a negative money amount indicating a credit to the customer’s balance.

So you make a new invoice and choose the customer as always. Put the date. After choosing the customer, the right panel opens up and the credit appears. You will see that the panel is called Add to Invoice. Click Add. It will make the invoice’s money amount negative. Click Save and Close. Now you can go back to the report called Transaction List by Customer.

The next thing to do is Receive Payment. The “payment’ will be the credit we just made. We want to apply it to our invoice. Because QuickBooks doesn’t know which invoice to apply our credit to, we need to uncheck the wrong invoices and check the correct one. You will see that the credit is at the bottom of the window. Make sure amount received is zero. When you are ready click Save and Close. Again, we have made a zero dollar invoice.

Check your results in the Open invoice Report.