What do you do if a customer underpays for an invoice you sent them?

If a customer underpays for a bill, you can do two things:

  1. Leave as an underpayment
  2. Write off the extra amount (meaning it becomes a bad debt expense)

Method 1: Leave as an underpayment

If you want to leave as an underpayment, make sure the bottom left hand radio button is selected on “leave as underpayment”.

Also make sure to bill the customer for the underpayment. To do that, you can do this in two ways:

A: Issue a statement

  • Go to Customers > Create Statements
  • Select Statement Date and make it the same date or after the date that you received the underpayment
  • If there is only 1 invoice that is outstanding, you can simply choose “All open transactions as of Statement Date”
  • If there is more than 1 invoice outstanding, you’ll have to pick a date range by selecting “Statement Period From” and choosing the appropriate dates (the FROM date will be the date of the invoice, the TO date will be the date you received the partial payment)
  • Under Select Customers, choose “One Customer” and choose the correct customer
  • Click on “Preview” to see if the statement is showing the correct amount owing. If good, print it out!
  • Done!

B: Re-Print / Re-Issue the Invoice

Instead of issuing a statement, you can also re-print or re-issue the invoice. This is a matter of finding the invoice and re-printing it or re-emailing / saving as pdf AND using an invoice template that shows payment/credits and balance due.

The default templates that comes with Quickbooks that show payment/credits are:

  • Attorney’s Invoice
  • Fixed Fee Invoice
  • Invoice from Proposal
  • Progress Invoice
  • Time & Expenses Invoice

Method 2: Write off the extra amount

  • Click on the write off the extra amount radio button and then click save and close or save and new
  • Choose the account to write off the bad debt (should be bad debt expense, if you don’t have a bad debt expense account create one)
  • Done!