How do I invoice a customer for expenses?

We had a question on our Facebook page about how to invoice a customer for reimbursed of expenses. Turns out, it’s pretty easy. Well, the billing part anyway. Getting the customer to actually send you a check is another story.

Video script:

Hi I’m Zack with the QuickBooks for Mac team, and I’m here to answer a question one of our users asked on our Facebook page. Here’s her question:

“Lets say I have a vendor who is a printer. I pay them and then get reimbursed from my client. How does that work?”

Thanks for the question. I’m going to show you how to get reimbursed by a customer in one of our sample files that come with QuickBooks. Let’s say I’m a contractor working on a deck for my customer. I’ve bought lumber from a vendor which they’ve delivered. They’ve sent me a bill, and I’m entering it in QuickBooks. Notice I’m using the Expenses pane on the Enter Bill windows. Now here in the Customer:Job column, I select the customer Erika Pretell and the job Residential because that’s the customer and job I’m buying the lumber for.

Now, I’d like to be reimbursed for this expense by my customer. So I create an invoice for Erika. QuickBooks knows I’ve assigned billable costs to Erika back when I entered that bill, so now it asks me if I want to include this cost in the invoice. I click OK. Then I click Time and Costs. Now, you’ll see on the Expenses pane the delivery fee and the lumber that was on the bill I entered. I click Select All to add those to the invoice. I can add a markup to this if I want to, which I’m going to do here, and select the Markup Income account. But you don’t have to add a markup if you choose not to.

Now I click OK and you’ll see on the invoice that those expenses are now a part of the invoice I’m going to send Erika. So that’s how you track expenses you want to be reimbursed for.

Thanks for watching! For more advice on using QuickBooks for Mac, go to quickbooks.com/littlesquare. And you can find out about new videos and articles by joining us on Facebook and Twitter.


About Zack Jarrett

Zack is a member of the QuickBooks for Mac team. He lives in Tuscon where he loves hanging out with his family and friends and figuring out how things work. We don't know what we'd do without him. Honest.

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