Customer Prepayments - All about Customer Prepayments in QuickBooks

Finally! A new easy way for Customer Prepayments that eliminates the old, confusing (yet "official"!) way!

There are two ways to do customer prepayments and client retainers in QuickBooks. One way is easy. The other is hard, the "official" way. Which is best for you? I'll show you.

I once had a wonderful client named Brad. He was an engineer and owned his own firm, not far from my home.

Brad often received prepayments from customers and thought he knew how to show them in QuickBooks, but he wasn't sure. So, long before he found me, he hired somebody to help him, a very knowledgeable and sweet bookkeeper by all accounts.

But Brad thought the "official" way was so confusing! He couldn't remember all of the steps, there were so many. Plus they didn't make sense to him.

But it was the "right" way, the way all of the bookkeepers and CPAs thought it should be done. Even the internal QuickBooks help teaches the "official" way.

So Brad found somebody else, a wonderful CPA. The CPA agreed with the "official" way for prepayments. So HE tried to show Brad again and again how it was "supposed" to be done.

Because Brad is not bookkeeper, he just could not remember how to do it. He couldn't remember how to show the prepayment on an invoice, and how to figure out how much each customer had on balance after some of the prepayment had been used.

But TWO people told him to do them the "official" way, so he continued to struggle with the confusing steps.

But between his old way of doing them, and the new way, his books WERE A DISASTER! I had to spend many hours to clean up his Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss statements.

I'm sure...

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