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JDM · September 17th, 2007

i'm looking to set up my screen printing biz in quick books and need help/advice on the best way to invioce customers.

should i have seprate items for the shirt, color or white/ash, # of colors printed, # of print locations? or what?

could someone send me a sample invioce to see how other people invoice in this industry?

what has worked for you folks?

i just want to set it up the best way possible.

jgratil · September 18th, 2007

While I'm not in the screenprinting business, I do Accounts Payable work with my current sidejob, and I can tell you from an accountant's perspective: the more information the better. People tend to forget exactly what they had ordered at what price because, let's face it, we're all busy.

What I reccommend doing is keep it detailed, but keep it clean. Us account payables folk like having information at our fingertips, but the last thing we want to do is read an encyclopedia. So, at the very least, here's what I suggest including in your invoices:

Invoice (or Reference) number
Date
Job(s) (By Breakdown)
- How Many Shirts
- How Many Colors (Per Design)
- Specialized Charges (such as specialized print locations, additional work fees, applicable credits, etc.)
Payment Terms
Additional Information (if you feel that there is something you could provide to answer a question someone may potentially have, answer it!)

Those are the basics, of course there are other things you can do as well, such as coloring your invoices differently (with hundreds of invoices per week, that actually helps our job out A LOT.) If there is one thing that I absolutely suggest you provide on your invoice, it would be to CLEARLY PROVIDE A DIRECT CONTACT PERSON AND PHONE NUMBER. That way, if any one does encounter some questions, your account rep could answer them right away and clear any confusion in a matter of seconds.

JDM · September 21st, 2007

thanks, i think i'm gona try the T-Invoicer program. it's cheap and looks easy to use.

JDM · September 23rd, 2007

well i have decided to give quickbooks 1 more try untill i change programs.

so how would i account for waste in quick books? with inventory. say i have an order for 40 shirts. so i order 50. deliver 40, have 2 bad prints (waste) and restock 8. how do i account for proffit and loss?

debz1959 · September 23rd, 2007

50 go into inventory when you enter the vendor invoice.

40 come out of inventory and into Costs of Goods Sold when you enter the customer invoice.

2 come out of inventory and into an expense account. I've set up one called "Misprints". An easy way to do this is "sell" the t's to a dummy customer with no price and then make a general journal entry transfering the amount posted to the COG into the expense account. You should also do this for samples or display items, set up a "Samples/Display" expense account.

You don't want the amount to stay in the COG because it gives you an unrealistic "Gross Profit" amount.

I'm sure that there is a "proper" way of doing this, but even though I've been using accounting software for over 10 years, I sometimes take shortcuts and tweek things because of my accounting background.

JDM · September 24th, 2007

thanks, i will give this a try.

kriscad · September 24th, 2007

let me just give you some advice...

pay for the DAILY backup service... i think its 10.00 a month

we lost almost 600 invoices (2 months worth of work) gone - due to a HD failure and we accidentally backed it up with a older copy when we reinstalled QBpro.