Question: I use the order system in QuickBooks Premier. Why don’t the customer sales order and supplier purchase order appear in my financial statements?
In QuickBooks, the customer sales order and supplier purchase order are “non-posting” information. That means that they are logged in the order portion of the software, but they aren’t posted in your accounting system until:
a. The customer sales order is converted to an invoice.
b. The supplier purchase order is entered as a bill or paid, whichever is first.
There are benefits and disadvantages to this. As you noted, they don’t show up in your financial statements until you do something “official” with them—converting to an invoice or bill (or payment), which makes it more difficult to track orders in process.
On the other hand, this is a very forgiving aspect of QuickBooks. You can edit or delete the customer sales order or supplier purchase order without impacting anything else. For instance, when you receive the invoice from the supplier, you merely go in and adjust the supplier purchase order to match what you owe and will pay the supplier, and then you can convert it to a bill or pay the supplier. Also, this is when you can edit the customer sales order to reflect those pesky extra charges from the suppliers—overruns, under runs, freight and those charges you had no idea were coming. What?!? And now you can create the customer invoice, which then posts to your general ledger system.
Harriet Gatter, owner of Accounting Support LLC, was an ad specialty distributor for 23 years and an adjunct professor of accounting at Neumann University. She sold her promotional products business in 2012, became certified as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, and now works exclusively with ad specialty distributors nationwide on their QuickBooks and accounting needs.
Please email accounting questions you would like considered for the column to [email protected] with the subject line of “Ask the Accountant.”
