I'm helping a friend who already runs a general store and post office set up his new Newspaper delivery business. The business is already mature and being bought from someone who is retiring.
He would like to find a software solution that can automatically generate invoices to his customers on a weekly or monthly basis with their newspapers of choice plus delivery. This is easy to do, but most of the packages we've looked at will not adjust future invoices in the event of a price change - they stick with the price that was in place when the original recurring invoice was made.
This seems like a feature that should be available somewhere, but I can't find it for the life of me!
My friend currently uses QuickBooks Pro 2014 for his general store business, but is open to using something else for this invoicing task if necessary.
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Glance at this
I have not seen/used this but you could at least review it as it seems relevant.
www.cunninghams.co.uk/Paper-Round.aspx
Captain
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With Xero, you can easily update a recurring invoice with a new price for future invoices, or amend it prior to issue if you have got the old price listed.
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With Xero if you set it up the line item as an inventory item the new price will come through if you set those up, BUT would have to tab through each invoice to force it to pick up the new inventory price or it would default to the original price when the template was set up.
However presumably you update them anyway, eg put in "August 2014 papers" as a description then you will presumably need to go into each invoice in any case, unless it just has a date and generic line items.
What you cant do in Xero, (but presumably is the aim), is to update the inventory items so all the templates update globally so you can just bulk print or email out to the customers "untouched by human hands". Its not that flash.
Quickbooks - desktop
This allows you to change the price of an item ie Daily Mail up 10p. It will also automate the production of invoices.
The online version may allow you to to do this too but I have not investigated this yet.
QuickBooks Online
I would strongly recommend using QuickBooks Online (QBO), rather than a desktop product. It is very much more flexible and will enable invoices to be created and sent automatically every week or month, as required. They can be emailed automatically directly from the software, so your friend need do nothing more than set them up once and let the software do the rest.
You can set each customer up with a sales item at an initial price and then either change the recurring transaction for an individual customer or change the cost of the template sales item, which will then automatically amend all future invoices for all customers that use that sales item. Thus, if 200 customers have a sales item called "Daily Mail weekly delivery" and the price goes up from £10 to £12, you need only amend the sales item from £10 to £12 (a single amendment that will take a few seconds) and the next invoice that goes out to each of those 200 customers will now be priced at £12. (BTW if you offer some customers a fixed price that you don’t want to change when your standard prices change, just use a separate, fixed price ‘sales item’ for those).
I would not use a separate tool for invoicing, as it much more efficient for the invoicing to be within the overall bookkeeping product. As for the rest of QBO's features, I think you'll find it just as good as QB’s desktop product and the efficiencies of working in the cloud make it a better option, in my opinion. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this further.