Delayed Charges in QuickBooks Online

There a function in QuickBooks Online called “Delayed Charges”. This is located underneath the Customers menu within the “New” button on the left-hand side.

The purpose of this function (it also can be called a non-posting charge) is to store your ongoing charges, to be billed out to your customers at some point. This function is analogous to the function of “Statement Charges” in QuickBooks Desktop.

A “charge” to your customer is mainly for ongoing service providers, such as for legal or bookkeeping or even landscaping fees, and serves the purpose of billing for uninterrupted services. However, this function is even more especially useful if these uninterrupted services are always changing in nature each time the service is performed.

For example, a landscaper can work your lawn, say every Tuesday and perform the exact same services each week. So, in this case, the landscaping service probably will not have a use for delayed charges as they can just bill in monthly package fees instead (since the work involved is probably not going to deviate too much from one month to the next).

However, let’s say an attorney is performing uninterrupted services, but you know that an attorney’s tasks can be drastically different from one day to the next. So, in this case, the attorney should probably utilize the function of delayed charges, that way these charges can be dumped onto one invoice at the end of the billing period, usually each month.

QuickBooks Online has two important fields in their delayed charges function:

• Delayed Charge Date – This is the official date that you recognize the charge in your books, but this is still a non-posting event. This date will show in your “Unbilled Charges” report in QuickBooks Online.
• Service Date – This is the official date that the service was actually performed for your customer or client. This is the date that will show once you dump or transfer this onto an actual invoice, in which time you will now have an Accounts Receivable. Keep in mind that your Accounts Receivable date will be based on your invoice date that you set and not the service date of the actual task. So, you obviously can have lots of service dates on one invoice and hopefully you will once you get your business going successfully.

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.