Video: Creating an Invoice in QuickBooks 2011 for Mac

It’s video week on Little Square! We’ll be posting lots of videos during the week specifically for QuickBooks 2011 for Mac. In this video tutorial, I show you how to create an invoice. This is for all you newbies out there who told us you wanted more basic “how to” tutorials. More to come! If you have suggestions for a tutorial, use We want to hear from you to let us know.

Video script:

Hi. I’m Shelly with the QuickBooks for Mac team, and today I’m going to talk about creating an invoice.

To create an invoice, you can start on the Home Page and click Create Invoices.

Now if you’re brand new to QuickBooks, you may not have any customer information entered yet. Well, that’s no problem. Just enter a name. If QuickBooks doesn’t recognize it, you can Quick Add it. That means the name is added to your Customer Center. Later on, when you have time, you can go here and enter all the information about the customer.

But chances are you already have information on a customer entered in QuickBooks, so you can just select that customer name from the pull-down list. Then you have the option to select a class. A class is just a category that means something to you that can help you track income and expenses in QuickBooks.

Next, enter other information that you want on the invoice, such as a PO number and the payment terms for your customer. Then you’ll select what you’re invoicing the customer for. In this example, the invoice is for blueprint changes. I’m charging for two hours of work, so I put 2 in the Quantity field, then the rate which is 150 dollars and hour and when I press tab to move into the amount field, QuickBooks calculates the total of 300 dollars.

So now my invoice is ready to go. The question is how do I get it to my customer. I several options. I can print it right now and drop it in the mail. Or I can email it. To email it, I select To Be Emailed on the invoice. Then when I’m done entering invoices, I choose File  and then Email forms. And there’s that invoice I just created, number 1102. I just want to email this one invoice, so I select only that one and click Email. I can then use the standard email note. QuickBooks will replace the word contact with the name of my customer. Then when I click send, QuickBooks uses whatever default email program I use to email the invoice.

So that’s how you create an invoice in QuickBooks for Mac. For more articles, videos, and advice on using QuickBooks, go to quickbooks.com/littlesquare.


About Shelly King

Shelly King works for Intuit as a member of the QuickBooks for Mac team. She’s the Managing Editor for Little Square and its main contributor. Shelly grew up in the South until 1994 when the Internet called her to Silicon Valley. She’s done a lot on the web ever since. Little Square was her idea. Yep, it’s all her fault. See all of Shelly's articles

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