How to Show Invoiced Income on a Profit and Loss Statement

Evan Stone

OK... I'm not sure about this, but it sure feels like I have a situation that might be unique or at least rare.

BACKSTORY
Every month I use the invoicing feature in Quicken to invoice my client, and when the client pays me and Quicken downloads the transaction from my bank, it automatically matches the payment transaction to the invoice, which is great, and that is evidently the workflow that Quicken wants to use.

THE PROBLEM
The problem is that this week I need to generate a profit and loss statement for a lender, however those transactions that I would consider income are not appearing on the statement.

In the register, the transactions are categorized as: "[XYZ Client Invoices]" — and it feels like that's what's tripping up the statement.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure how to resolve the issue. I assume that I could save off a copy of my Quicken file, and then re-categorize those transactions temporarily to plain vanilla income transactions (categorized for schedule C income), and then presumably they would show up in the profit and loss statement.

However my preference would be to get this so that in the future event that I need to generate a profit loss statement again, it will just work. Is there a way to get it to behave the way that I would like it to?

QUICKEN VERSION
If it helps, I am currently using Home, Business & Rental for Windows, version R29.16.

NotACPA

If you're on a Cash Basis for your accounting (which means, virtually everyone) your "invoiced amounts" aren't income.

They don't become income until you're actually paid (i.e., receive the cash).

You can certainly show the lender those invoices, but I don't expect that you'll get much assistance from them, because your clients could always default.

UKR

What category are the invoice line items assigned to? Should be some Business Income category.

Is that category and/or the Customer Invoices account included in the report that you are generating?

Evan Stone

The basic problem is that the transaction is being treated like a transfer (thus the brackets in the category name). As a workaround, I copied the file to use as a temporary scratchpad, and I just assigned those transactions income categories (With the appropriate schedule C assignment). Once I reassigned those transactions, the profit and loss statements came to life, as I hypothesized it would. So that's the good news.

Unfortunately the bad news is that this gets back to the original problem that I mentioned, which is that it sure would be nice if when I download the transaction from my bank, Quicken would do the right thing automatically—whatever that is supposed to be to make this all work correctly.

It does the matching automatically, and it feels like the automatic assignment that it is doing now kinda works, but it has drawbacks when it comes to generating reports like this.

Some of the problem is that I just don't have a really good handle on accounting principles and invoicing enough (especially where Quicken is concerned) to know exactly what the right process *should* be.

So there is probably some learning I have to do around all that so that I can manually make this function correctly, unless you have any suggestions.