Invoices from Purchase Orders

[clogie]

I have a non-inventory business. When I receive an order, I create a purchase order for a vendor. The vendor ships the product directly to the customer and notifies me. At that point I create an invoice to send to the customer.
I would like to find a way to create an invoice from a purchase order since the invoice has basically the same information (other than prices and address info). Is there a way to do this in quickbooks so that I dont have to duplicate the effort of entering all the items twice?

[Linda Limas]

As I understand it, your vendors drop-ship to your customers for you. Then the vendor Bills you and you Invoice the customer.

If so, this is easy to do in Quickbooks. You don't create the Invoice directly from the Purchase Order, though.

When you issue the PO, I'm assuming you enter the customer's name in the "Ship To" field to automatically fill in the ship to address. You'll notice that QB then also fills in the customer's name on each line item you are purchasing. This action sets up that line item to be billed to that customer.

When you receive the Bill from the vendor, you should receive the items against the Purchase Order to close out the PO. Soon as you "receive" the items against the PO, QB is ready to invoice your customer.

Start an Invoice for the customer. Click the Time/Costs button, and you'll find a list of items drop-shipped to your customer. Select those you want to add to the Invoice. Correct the price to include your markup. It's that easy.

The above describes how I do this in QB Pro 99. It works for inventory or non-inventory items. Later versions should have the same functionality.

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By the way, if you invoice your customer upon receipt of a Shipping Notice instead of waiting for the Bill, use the Item Receipt function to accomplish the same thing.

By the way, if you issue one PO for multiple drop shipments to different customers (you type the ship to addresses in the body of the PO), you can change the customer name on each line item to indicate which customer should be Invoiced.

By the way, items don't appear on the Time/Costs list in the Invoice window until you indicate to Quickbooks that they've been shipped either by posting either an Item Receipt or a Bill from your vendor against the PO.

By the way there's a handy report Unbilled Costs by Job that you can run monthly to see if you've forgotten to Invoice any items for which you've been Billed by vendors.

[clogie]

Thank you! This is exactly what I want to do! You've saved me tons of work....

[Linda Limas]

Since I posted this in 2002, Quickbooks has added some handy features in later year desktop versions* that make this process even easier.

As an example, IF you have a fairly recent** Quickbooks Premiere version or higher*** that has the Sales Order feature, you can use the Sales Order window to record your customer's order; then you create the Purchase Order from the sales order window.

This changes the "flow" of processing, so check what features your version has and revise my procedures above as appropriate.

Linda

*My particular clientele doesn't use the online version due to feature limitations.
** By fairly recent, I mean I checked back to 2008 Premiere, and, the Sales Order feature was present. Check your version.
*** Quickbooks Pro doesn't include the Sales Order feature, at least as of 2012 version, haven't checked 2013 yet, but presumably not.