Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008

Creating your first invoice

Customer area

To create a new invoice, click on the New Invoice button in the Start a task section of the customer area.

Blank customer invoice

This is the invoice form. The top section has information about the customer, date of the sale and terms, the product and services grid contains the products and services you are invoicing for and at the bottom of the form you can see the totals.

Adding a customer

Start by typing the customer name and use the tab key or mouse to move to another field. This will open up a dialog that asks you if you want to add the new customer. You can add the new customer by selecting Fast Add, or you can set up the customer completely by clicking Set Up. For your first customer, just select Fast Add.

Adding a line

After you have completed the top of the invoice form, continue by adding a line. Notice you can add a product or a service, a comment, VAT or a nominal account. Just chose product or service and type the name of what you are selling in the name field.

New product

After you tab out of the name field, Office Accounting will ask you if you want to set up a new product. Click Yes.

Select product or service type

Now you have to select which item type you want to set up (Office Accounting Express only has services and non-stock products). In this example we are selling a service. Click OK.

New service

Fill in the information on the item form: Product name, description, Sales price, Income account and VAT code. You can also enter a standard cost of the service to be able to calculate your profitability with the customer.

Click Save and Close after you have entered the information.

Fill in the rest of the information on the invoice, such a quantity, discount and other details.

Completed invoice

When you are done, you can save the invoice by pressing CTRL-S or by selecting Save on the File menu.

Adding details to customer

When you save the invoice Office Accounting will ask you if you want to save the customer address and payment information. Click Yes to save the information.

Saved invoice

The invoice is now saved. Notice that a lot of fields are now greyed out and cannot be edited.

The final step is to print the invoice. Press CTRL-P or select Print on the File menu. This will bring up the print dialog.

Print dialog

To print a standard invoice, select the printer, leave Basic form as the print option and press OK.

Office Accounting also allows you to use Word to print custom invoices. To learn more, please refer to the Printing quotes and invoices in Word training article.