You have just started your new business and completed your first job or sold your first merchandise. Now you want to be paid, but your customer has requested an invoice from you. What is that? It is basically a list of goods sent or services provided, indicating the amount due for these. You might think of it as a bill. For accounting purposes, many customers won’t pay until a sales invoice is presented.

So let’s say you are running a computer repair business. Before you can starting issuing invoices to customers, you need to set yourself up as a business in Manager.

Create a business

In the Businesses tab, click Add Business and select Create New Business:

Enter your business name. This will be the name of your business data file. Click Add Business:

Your business will be created, but it will look nearly empty, with only a few tabs showing at the left:

Now click on Settings, then Business Details:

Enter your business information as you want it to appear on the sales invoice:

Click Update.

Customizing left navigation

Since every business is different, all but those four modules will be disabled by default. To issue a sales invoice to a customer, you will need to enable the Customers and Sales Invoices tabs.

Click Customize below the left navigation pane and enable these two tabs:

Be sure to click Update at the bottom to save your choices:

Now you are getting somewhere. Your left navigation pane will contain two new tabs, Customers and Sales Invoices:

Adding a customer

Before you can issue your first invoice, you must add at least one customer. Click on theCustomers tab, then click New Customer:

Enter the customer’s details:

Click Create. Your customer is now saved and can be seen in the list of customers:

Now you are ready to issue an invoice to this customer.

Issuing an invoice

In the Sales Invoices tab, click New Sales Invoice:

A sales invoice form will open, where you need to select or fill in at least four fields:

• Customer, which causes previously entered customer details to populate the form
• Account to which the sale will be posted.
• Description of what is being sold
• Unit price

Click Create to save the invoice. You will be instantly taken to a preview of your invoice:

To change the overall look of your invoice, read about themes, which allow you to vary the appearance of your invoice and other forms.

After applying a tax code and changing the theme, your invoice could look like this:

Then use the Email button to email the invoice to your customer or use the PDF button to generate a PDF image to be saved or printed.