QuickBooks is powerful for accounting and bookkeeping in your business, but you can also use it for much more. Use QuickBooks to keep track of sales opportunities similar to what you might do with a full-fledged sales CRM system. Keep in mind that sales prospects that turn into actual customers will end up in your books anyway, so here’s how to change an estimate into an invoice using QuickBooks accounting software.
-
- Go to the Sales menu and select All Sales.
- Find and open the estimate.
- Select Create invoice.
- Add more details to the invoice as necessary, then select Save and close
You can only save an estimate if it’s accepted or pending. Select the drop-down under the customer’s name to modify.
Track Sales Estimates
You’re going to create invoices and log payments within QuickBooks, so it’s best to have these customers logged early in the process. When a new prospect contacts you, you can create a contact within QuickBooks. You can do this manually or you can integrate it with your external third-party sales tool.
Once the prospect is ready for an estimate, you can use a sales estimate as a template to compile information about their project. The sales estimate can be sent as a formal estimate for the prospect which makes your business look more professional.
If you already logged sales estimates in QuickBooks, you can simply use the sales estimate report to see the status of open estimates. You can also see how long the estimates have been open to determine which should be followed up on.
To make things more efficient and accurate in your sales process, you can use QuickBooks to store past sales estimates that you can use when creating future estimates. You can even keep track of which were won and which were lost to guide future sales estimate processes.
Listen to Bernard explain how you can better track and utilize creates sales estimates:
