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QuickBooks

How to Create an Invoice in QuickBooks Online (and How to Stop Doing It By Hand)

Click + New, choose Invoice, pick the customer, add your product or service lines, set the terms, then save and send. About two minutes per invoice if nothing's unusual. Here's the full walkthrough, and what it looks like once you stop doing this manually.

The full walkthrough

1. Open a new invoice. Click + New in the left navigation, then choose Invoice under the Customers column.

2. Pick the customer. Select them from the dropdown. If they're new, you can add them right from the invoice screen without losing your place.

3. Add each product or service as its own line. If you've got your products and services list set up, QuickBooks pulls in the price automatically. If not, type it in directly on the line.

4. Set the dates and terms. The invoice date defaults to today. For the due date, either pick a specific date or choose terms like Net 30 and let QuickBooks calculate it for you.

5. Save and send. Choose Save and send to email it immediately as a PDF, with a Pay Now link if you've got QuickBooks Payments turned on, or just Save if you're not ready yet.

Where this gets old fast

That's fine for one invoice. It's a different story for the fortieth one this month, or the invoice that went out three days late because nobody remembered, or the line-item typo nobody caught until the client called about it.

Most businesses don't experience this as a problem they need to solve. They just quietly accept that someone sits down for an hour or two every week and does this by hand, the same way, every time.

It doesn't have to be a manual decision each time an invoice is needed. QuickBooks can create and send it the moment something else happens: a job gets marked complete, a deal closes, a subscription renews, an order comes in from your store. The invoice goes out and nobody opens QuickBooks at all.

What we've built on top of QuickBooks invoicing

Job-triggered invoicing

A job gets marked complete in your project management or field service tool, and the matching QuickBooks invoice goes out automatically. Nobody has to remember, and nothing gets double-billed or missed.

Automatic payment chasing

Overdue invoices trigger reminder emails on a schedule you set. Accounts that stay quiet past a threshold get flagged for a person to step in, instead of someone manually checking who still owes money.

What's slowing down your invoicing?

Those are two examples out of however many ways this can go. What does your invoicing actually look like, and where does it get stuck?

Let's talk

Using QuickBooks and tired of creating invoices by hand?

Tell us what triggers an invoice in your business, a job finishing, an order coming in, a contract getting signed. We'll tell you if it can run itself. And if invoicing isn't actually where it hurts, that's fine too. Whatever you're doing by hand, in QuickBooks or anywhere else in your business, is fair game.

Let's talk

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I customize my QuickBooks invoice template?+
Go to the gear icon, then Custom Form Styles, then New Style to build a new look, or edit an existing one. You can change the logo, color, font, and which columns show up (quantity, rate, and so on) without touching a single invoice individually. The invoice number sequence is separate: that's under Account and Settings > Sales > Sales form content > Custom transaction numbers.
How do I mark an invoice as paid in QuickBooks?+
Open the invoice and select Receive payment. If the payment already showed up elsewhere, like a bank deposit you matched separately, you can mark it paid without re-entering the payment details.
How do I delete or cancel an invoice in QuickBooks Online?+
Open the invoice, select More at the bottom, then Delete. This can't be undone and it changes your reports retroactively, so for an invoice a customer has already seen, voiding it usually leaves a cleaner trail than deleting it outright.
How do I write off an invoice in QuickBooks?+
Writing off an invoice is different from deleting it: the invoice stays on record, but you're recognizing it as bad debt instead of pretending it never happened. Create a Bad Debt expense account if you don't have one, then apply a credit memo for the invoice amount against that account. Deleting an invoice erases it; writing it off keeps the paper trail, which is what you want for your books and for taxes.
Can QuickBooks send invoices automatically?+
For invoices that repeat on a schedule, yes: QuickBooks' own Recurring Transactions feature handles that natively. Anything triggered by something happening outside QuickBooks, a job finishing, an order placed somewhere else, is custom automation, which is what we build.

Let's talk

Tell us the one thing your team does manually that eats up time. We read every message and reply within a day.