What's a Statement?
A statement is a summary of your customer’s account with you and has been a feature in QuickBooks for some time. Instead of sending the customer a copy of their several invoices, you can gather that same information into a statement.
Why Use Statements?
Generally, large accounts prefer to see their account details on a statement. They don’t necessarily need to see specific items, just the invoice number, the amount, and what’s been paid off so far. Statements are a great way to summarize a collection of invoices for a given customer account.
Statements Permission
If you want to access these statement features, you will need to have the “Statements” permission added to your profile.
Profile permissions can be adjusted in the employees tab within settings.
Using Statements
You can open the “Statements” section via the office tab. Here you’ll be presented with some options for filter criteria and your active customer/location/job list.
Select the accounts receivables account you would like to view here. Most companies only have one A/R account. If you have more , you may want to ask your office admin which one you should be viewing.
When you choose to produce a statement in a moment, what date would you like the statement to say? We default this to the current date for you under the assumption that you’ll be emailing these statements momentarily.
Use this section to select all transactions within a specific date range for your customer. You could use this option to select transactions or use the option below instead.
You can use this instead of the above option to select all open transactions up to the current date.
You can decide how you would like to present the statement to the customer. Either choose to do one statement per customer, or a separate statement per job after selecting a given customer.
If my customer has 5 jobs with 5 invoices, do you want 5 statements? If not, stick with per customer.
Without this option, your statements will contain the following information per invoice: invoice number, due date, and original amount.
If you check this option, you will see the above information plus the items and a sales tax breakdown.
If you aren’t sure which option to pick, we’ve included a preview of both options below.
You can select which customers/locations/jobs to create statements from using the checkboxes to the left of each record name. If you select a customer record, you’re selecting all invoices that are part of that customer and any of their child records. Selecting a location is similarly anything connected to that location down.
We recommend that you only select one record per customer as more than one will make multiple statements for the same charges!
If you click the “preview” option, you can view the statements you’ve selected to create.
The information presented on this statement was created to mirror the behavior of QuickBooks statements and will show the same crucial information needed to see a summary of that customer’s account. Even invoices made in QuickBooks directly will appear on this statement.
Under these pictures on the left, we’ve noted whether or not the statement used the “Show Invoice Item Details” option.
Sending Statements
Smart Service has the option to email a copy of the customer’s statement to them directly from the program. In order to use this feature, you’ll need to set up a template email to accompany the attached statement.
The email template can be created inside of the Add-ons section of settings, as shown below. When you send the statement to the customer, the subject and body of the email will be the template your created, with the statement as an attachment to the email.
You can right-click while building your template to insert merge fields into the template message. This way, Smart Service can ad the customer’s name or other personalized details to the message.
When you’re ready, click the email button on the “Statements” screen after you’ve selected the customers/locations/jobs you wish to have statements sent for.
If you have our merchant service, CardPointe, your statements will include the option for your customer to pay online via your personalized Hosted Payment Page. You can learn more about these options here.