n-How to Create a Sales Receipt in QuickBooks Online
Click + New, choose Sales receipt under Customers, pick the customer, set how they paid, add your product or service lines, and save. Use a sales receipt instead of an invoice whenever the customer has already paid in full on the spot, cash, card, or check, so there's no balance left to collect.
The full walkthrough
1. Start a new sales receipt. Click + New, then Sales receipt, found under the Customers column alongside Invoice.
2. Pick the customer. Use the dropdown, or add a new customer right there without leaving the screen. For a one-off walk-in sale, a generic "Cash customer" entry works fine if you don't need to track them individually.
3. Choose the payment method. Select cash, check, credit card, or whatever applies. This matters for your reports later, so it's worth picking the real method rather than defaulting to whatever's first on the list.
4. Set where the money goes. Choose Undeposited Funds if this sale will be grouped with others into one bank deposit later, which is the usual choice for card and check payments. Choose the bank account directly if this is cash you're depositing on its own.
5. List out what was sold, line by line. Same as an invoice: pull items from your products and services list for automatic pricing, or type a line in by hand. Add as many lines as the sale actually has.
6. Apply sales tax if it applies. If the items are taxable and you've got sales tax set up, QuickBooks calculates it automatically based on the customer's address; double-check the rate looks right before saving, especially for an out-of-state or out-of-county sale.
7. Save, then print or email. Choose Save and send to email a PDF immediately, Print or Preview for a physical copy, or just Save if you don't need to deliver anything right now.
Sales receipt or invoice: the one decision that matters here
The whole point of a sales receipt is that the money's already in hand. If there's any chance the customer hasn't actually paid yet, even if you expect them to within the hour, use an invoice instead and apply the payment when it lands. Recording an unpaid sale as a sales receipt makes your books say you were paid when you weren't.
For what a sales receipt actually is and how it differs from an invoice at a conceptual level, see what a sales receipt is in QuickBooks. For emailing or re-sending one after it's created, see how to send a receipt.
Why creating these one at a time adds up
A sales receipt takes a minute or two if nothing's unusual. A business doing this dozens of times a day, every point-of-sale sale, every paid-on-the-spot order, is spending real time re-typing a transaction that already happened somewhere else first: a card reader, a booking app, a storefront checkout.
The sale data already exists the moment it happens. The only reason someone's retyping it into QuickBooks is that nothing's currently telling QuickBooks to create the matching sales receipt on its own.
What we've built on top of QuickBooks sales receipts
Checkout-triggered sales receipts
A sale completed through a storefront, booking app, or point-of-sale system creates the matching QuickBooks sales receipt the moment it happens, with the customer, items, and payment method already filled in correctly.
Deposit-ready batching
Sales receipts headed to Undeposited Funds get grouped to match the actual bank payout automatically, so the deposit step doesn't turn into a manual reconciliation job every time money lands.
Where does the sale actually happen before it shows up in QuickBooks?
In person, through an app, on a payment page, tell us which, and we'll tell you if the sales receipt can create itself.
Typing the same sale into QuickBooks after it already happened somewhere else?
Tell us where the sale is actually recorded first, your point of sale, a booking system, a storefront, and we'll tell you whether QuickBooks can pick it up automatically from there. Sales receipts are just one example; we automate whatever else is getting manually re-entered in your business.
Let's talk