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When using Quickbooks to keep track of your business’s financial transactions, you’ll probably come across the term “Progress Invoicing.” This billing feature works like traditional invoices but with one major difference: Progress Invoicing is used to send many small invoices to a customer rather than a single invoice for 100% of the money owed. It’s called Progress Invoicing because it invoices the customer based on the progress of the work or job purchased. To learn more about Progress Invoicing and how to use this feature in Quickbooks, keep reading.

The purpose of Progress Invoicing is to bill customers incrementally rather than all at once. When a business sells a service to a customer, it may send the customer an invoice requesting payment. From landscapers and painters to advertising firms and doctors, countless businesses use invoices to bill their customers and collect payment for their services or goods sold. And while you can always use the traditional invoicing method of sending customers a single invoice, Progress Invoicing is a viable alternative that’s particularly useful for jobs that require a significant amount of time to complete.

Not all businesses need to use Progress Invoicing. While there’s no single right way to use it, Progress Invoicing is best used to bill customers for work that’s completely in incremental stages. A business-to-business (B2B) advertising company, for example, may use this feature to send its customers partial bills at different stages of their service. When one segment of the company’s advertising service has been completed, it may send the customer a partial invoice. And after the company completes the next segment of its service, it may send the customer a second partial invoice. There’s no limit to the number of partial invoices that you can send using Progress Invoicing. The most important thing, however, is that you invoice customers for the appropriate amount. In other words, don’t overbill your business’s customers by sending them too many partial invoices.

You can enable Progress Invoicing in Quickbooks Online by logging in to your account and clicking the gear icon at the top of the page. From here, click Account > Settings > Sales > Progress Invoicing. You’ll then need to click the pencil icon, followed by choosing “Create multiple partial invoices from a single estimate.” To complete the process, click “Save,” followed by “Done.” Quickbooks Online will now allow you to create an invoice using one of your saved estimates.

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