Are your customers and clients paying you on a timely basis? If you need to send out reminders to get your invoices paid, QuickBooks has two options that you can use to accomplish this. You can use an invoice letter or send out reminder statements.
Invoice letters are created for a specific customer directly from the overdue invoice. You can create a cover letter that summarizes information about the invoice and lists the outstanding balance. If you want you can even list all the line items.
You can use the following steps to create an invoice letter:
1. From the Reports menu, choose Customers & Receivables, and open invoices. Other reports will work too such as the accounts receivable aging detail or collection report. Use whichever works for you.
2. Find the customer’s name on the report and double-click on the invoice number you want to send the letter for.
3. You should now be in the create invoices window, click the arrow next to the letter and envelope icon to display drop-down list
4. Select prepare an Invoice letter. If you are prompted to find letters, click copy and QB will copy the letters from your directory.
5. Select Cover letter or if you want to include the line item detail select Invoice letter with details option
6. Type the name of the person you’re sending the letter to and their title and click next
7. QB will open the letter in Microsoft word; it contains summary and detail information about the unpaid invoice. You can edit the letter here if needed before printing.
Reminder Statements are documents that contain lists of all invoices, credit memos and payments received for a specific customer with the total amount due and other details. Before printing them you can review the information for each customer and decide whether or not to add finance charges to their account.
Below is one way of creating Reminder Statements:
1. On the Home Page select Statements. This displays the create Statements window. You can use today’s date or change it to whatever date you’d like
2. Select “All open transactions as of Statement Date” option
3. Click the “include only transaction over” checkbox and I would leave it as over 30 days.
4. You can select to print statements for all customers, multiple customers, just one customer or customers of a certain type
5. If you want you can also select additional options such as: show invoice item detail or do not create statements with a balance less than a certain amount
6. If you want to Assess Finance charges, click this option. It will open a new window where you can select which customers should receive a finance charge. If you see a message telling you finance charges have already been assessed today just answer yes.
7. After closing this section you are now ready to preview, print or email your statements.
Deciding on which type of reminder to send will be a personal choice. Maybe a combination of both would work for your business. Every couple weeks you could send out invoice letters to the larger accounts, just to give them a friendly reminder that their invoice is due, and then once a month send reminder statements to all past due customers.
Do you currently have a system in place for tracking down past due payments? Any idea’s or suggestions are welcome in comments below.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
