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You don’t have to offer the same price for a given product or service to all of your business’s customers. If you use QuickBooks, you can create a discount. Discounts are exactly what they sound like: price reductions. You can apply them to payments, or you can add them to invoices. Regardless, discounts will reduce the price of the product or service.

Create a Discount Item

Discounts in QuickBooks are items. To create a discount, you’ll need to create a discount item. Go to the “Lists” menu and select “Item List.” Click the “Item” link, followed by “New.” You should see “Discount” under the drop-down menu. Selecting this option will allow you to create a discount item.

QuickBooks offers two formats for discount items: dollar or percentage. The dollar format means the discount will consist of a flat dollar amount, such as $10, $20.50 or 75 cents. The percentage format, on the other hand, consists of a percentage. It’s the percentage of the payment or invoice to which the discount item is added. If you add a 10% discount item to a $100 invoice, the invoice amount will be reduced to $90.

Add to Invoice

After creating the discount item, you can add it to an invoice. Go ahead and add the product or service to the invoice. You can then add the discount item on the line below the product or service information.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to manually add the discount item to all invoices. You can add discounts to multiple invoices at once. Just place the discount item on the invoices, and after ordering the items, add the subtotal item on the proceeding line.

What About Sales Receipts?

You might be wondering whether it’s possible to add discount items to sales receipts. Sales receipts, of course, are summaries or statements that contain information about a purchase. Since the customer has already made the payment, sales receipts don’t support discounts.

Discount items are designed primarily for invoices and estimates. Invoices are documents requesting payment from a customer. Estimates are documents that provide a customer with the expected cost of a product or service. You can add discount items to invoices, or you can add them to estimates. You can’t, however, add discount items to sales receipts.

Have anything else that you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments section below!