QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Cash Sales

Receiving payment when you deliver the service or products is known as a cash sale, even though your customer might pay you with cash, check, or credit card. For example, if you run a thriving massage therapy business, your customers probably pay for their stress relief before they leave your office—and no matter how they pay, QuickBooks considers the transaction a cash sale.

If your customers want records of their payments, you give them sales receipts. In QuickBooks, a sales receipt can do double-duty: it records your cash sale in the program and you can print it as a paper receipt for your customer.

Note

Although a cash sale is a simultaneous exchange of money and goods (or services), you don’t actually have to create a QuickBooks sales receipt at the time of the sale.

Here are the two most common ways of handling cash sales:

• Recording individual sales. If you want to keep track of which customers purchase which products, create a separate sales receipt for each cash sale. Individual sales receipts track both customers’ purchases and the state of inventory.

  Note

  If you keep QuickBooks open on the computer in your store, you can print individual sales receipts for your customers. But keeping QuickBooks running on the store computer could be risky if the wrong people started snooping around in your records. And, unless you’re completely proficient with the program’s sales receipts, you might find paper sales receipts faster when your store is swamped. Then, when there’s ...