Creating Invoices in QuickBooks Desktop From Sales Orders and Estimates
QuickBooks Desktop lets you build an invoice from scratch, pull lines from a sales order, or convert an estimate, and each route has its own rules.
Creating an invoice sounds like the simplest task in QuickBooks Desktop, yet questions about it keep appearing in community forums. The confusion follows a pattern: where the form lives, how a discount attaches, and whether a sales order or an estimate can fill in the lines. A single marked solution covers all three routes, and its steps track the current Desktop menus.
The invoice form itself
Start from the Home screen or the Customers menu and choose Create Invoices. Pick a customer or job from the Customer:Job dropdown. If the name is not on the list yet, choose Add New and complete the record. The header carries the essentials: the date, the invoice number, the Bill To and Sold To addresses, and the payment terms.
The Terms field deserves a second look, since it drives the due date that aging reports rely on. In the detail area, select the items you are billing. When you choose an item, QuickBooks fills in its description and amount from the values stored at setup. Those figures are a starting point. You can edit or delete them on the invoice without changing the item itself.
Adding a discount to an invoice
There is no discount box on the face of the invoice form. The discount arrives as an item, so you build it once and reuse it on every sale. Go to the Lists menu from the Home screen and open Item List. Right-click anywhere in the list and choose New. On the Type dropdown, select Discount.
Give the item a name and a brief description. In the Amount or % field, enter a fixed figure or a percentage. If your discounts vary, leave the field blank and type the number directly on each sales form instead. Then pick the income account that will track the discounts you give customers, choose a tax code, and finish with OK and Save & Close. The account choice matters, because it decides where discounts land on your profit and loss reports.
Can you invoice straight from a sales order?
Yes, but edition comes first. Sales orders do not exist in QuickBooks Pro; Intuit reserves the feature for the Premier and Enterprise editions. On Pro, the routes below simply do not appear.
From an open sales order, use the Create Invoice button on the Main tab. A prompt offers two choices: bill every item on the order, or bill only the ones you select. The selected-items option suits a part shipment, since you can bill what went out and leave the rest for a later invoice.
The other direction works too. Start from Create Invoices, choose the customer, and an Available Sales Orders window lists each open order for that name. Select one or several. Either way, the lines arrive with a To Invoice column beside them. Enter a quantity in that column for each line you want to bill, and enter zero for anything you are holding back.
Converting an estimate into an invoice
Open the estimate and select Create Invoice at the top of the form. If progress invoicing is on, QuickBooks asks which items and quantities belong on this invoice. If it is off, a popup offers to mark the estimate as inactive so it stops showing as open work.
You can also start from the invoice side. Choose Create Invoices, pick the customer, and the Available Estimates window appears. Select the estimate you want to bill. One limit matters here: QuickBooks allows a single estimate per invoice, so two estimates cannot merge into one form.
How do you switch on progress invoicing?
The prompt only appears if the preference is already on. Go to the Edit menu, choose Preferences, and open Jobs & Estimates. On the Company Preferences tab, set the progress invoicing question to Yes. After that, converting an estimate asks what to include each time, which suits long jobs billed in stages.
The pattern we see is consistent: one invoice form, several possible sources. Learn where each source lives, and the form takes care of the rest.