Progress Invoicing Closes QuickBooks Online's Staged Billing Gap

Contractors, trades, and project consultancies have long been the awkward customers of small-business accounting software. They bid a job, take a deposit, then bill in stages as the work proceeds. Payments often arrive in pieces, sometimes against more than one invoice at a time. The accepted answer to this long community question is a single feature: Progress Invoicing in QuickBooks Online, a native path from estimate to staged invoices.

The billing gap project firms ran into

Multi-stage work does not fit a single invoice, and for years QuickBooks Online did not bend to it. The product recorded estimates, but one estimate could not feed a series of invoices. Firms that billed by milestone stayed on QuickBooks Desktop, or split jobs across hand-built workarounds. That single constraint kept a whole class of businesses off the platform.

Turning the feature on

The setting lives behind the gear icon. Choose Account and Settings, then Sales, then Progress Invoicing. Put a checkmark beside the option that lets one estimate produce multiple partial invoices, and save. New company files ship with the box already ticked; older files may need the one-time change. Intuit includes the feature in every QuickBooks Online plan, from the entry tier upward.

Three ways to bill from one estimate

The workflow has three moving parts: estimates, invoices, and reports. An estimate does not post to the books; it is a quote until you bill from it. Once the customer accepts the bid, open the estimate and choose Create invoice. The software then offers a genuine menu rather than a single path:

• Bill the entire remaining estimate at once, at 100 percent.
• Bill a percentage of the estimate. You enter one figure and the software applies it across every line.
• Bill selected lines only, setting either a percentage or a fixed amount for each line.

Each later invoice draws from what is left. The software remembers earlier billings on that estimate and bases the next round on the remainder.

How do you see what is left to bill?

The estimate doubles as the tally. Go to Sales, then All Sales, and filter the list to estimates. The Status column shows each one as Pending, Accepted, Closed, or Invoiced, and an invoiced estimate carries its percentage beside it. Open one to review the trail; the invoices generated from it sit alongside, each linked back to its parent. When you bill again, the menu starts from the un-billed remainder.

Partial payments, split payments, and credits

Payments rarely arrive as cleanly as invoices go out. A customer may underpay an invoice, overpay one, or send a single check against three. The payment window in QuickBooks Online handles all three cases. It lists every open invoice for the customer; tick the ones being paid and adjust the amount applied to each. A short payment leaves the balance due on that invoice. An overpayment can be held as a credit or applied to another open invoice on the spot.

That separation matters. The estimate tracks what you have billed, never what the customer has paid. Payment status lives on the invoices themselves and in the customer’s running balance. If the customer pays an emailed invoice by card or bank transfer, the software marks it paid without manual entry. To read a whole job, use both views: the estimate for billing progress, the invoice list for cash.

A caveat on the Projects dashboard

Progress invoicing pairs with the Projects dashboard, which gathers a job’s estimates, invoices, and costs into one view. The pairing has a plan limit worth knowing in advance. The invoicing workflow runs on every plan, including the entry tier. The Projects dashboard sits only on the higher tiers, Plus and Advanced. Firms on Simple Start or Essentials get the full staged-billing workflow, just without the job-level cockpit.

Reports that close the loop

Reporting completes the three-part workflow. The progress invoicing job report lists every estimate that has generated staged invoices, with the estimate total, the amount invoiced so far, the percentage invoiced, and the remainder. For a firm running many jobs at once, it is the fastest single view of billed versus un-billed work.

The bottom line

The old advice, keeping staged-billing work on Desktop, no longer holds. One checkbox, one accepted estimate, and a menu of three billing paths cover the pattern. The remaining friction is plan-level rather than feature-level, and knowing that distinction up front makes the migration conversation shorter.