how can you make sure you agree with your customer for the amount of money owed at any moment that's
the reason why QuickBooks Online allows you to print or email customer statements if you have
any questions about this topic you can leave them in the comment section below and I'll do my best
to help you and of course if you feel the video helped you I hope you will click like and don't
forget to subscribe to get updates on new videos that come out all the time a customer statement
is a document that we periodically give to customers who owe us money why do we give a
customer statement to our customers well first to make sure that we agree with the customer
what the balance is exactly as of the specific statement date secondly to make sure we agree
with the customer regarding all the transactions that have been recorded this helps us reconcile
any differences in our records from the customer records regarding the balance or the transactions
between the statement dates and it's like a legal declaration or assertion making sure the customer
knows what we assert they must pay so what's on a customer statement well the declared balance
as of the specific date listed on the statement the currently open invoices in they're open or
unpaid amount a list of all transactions between the start and finish date of the statements and
the balance forward which could also be called the running balance after each transaction now there
is a very important please note a statement does not have to be monthly it can simply be whatever
the agreement is between you and your customer for example if you have a hundred transactions
each week where many of them are invoices and many of them are payments you might want to
send out a statement each week rather than each month so that you can stop and reconcile with
your customer to make sure you agree with all the previous transactions before you engage in
any new transactions now the second note is very important when you're interacting with QuickBooks
Online in the interface to make a customer statement the customers email address must
be in the customer records and I'll show you how this will affect the creation of the statements
in QuickBooks Online for example let's give Alan each type of the three different statements listed
a moment ago between January 1 and January 31 of 2017 in our little story to do this you open the
new transaction menu either click on the top left where it says new or if you don't have that go to
the top right and click the plus sign close to the cogwheel either one will open the same choices in
the new transaction menu in this menu go to the column that says other and click statement now
in this window the reason why you do not see Alan is because Alan does have the email address in his
permanent records notice the only customers that are showing are the customers who are
missing an email address if I click statements that are available for customers over here now
I see every customer that I can possibly send a statement to notice Alan's email address this is
mine just for an example does show up here now you can type in email addresses for customers here but
it will not be permanent I will show you later how to make the email address permanent so it
shows up here every time if you type it in here it will only work on the current statement that
you're sending out right now so let's follow the directions and first we'll send a statement that
has only the open invoices as of the statement date and we already decided that the statement
date will be January 31 of 2017 because 2017 is our little story okay so all you have to do is put
open item it will only go back you know one year from the statement date that you declare here now
when I click apply okay it has to be to just the customers whom you want to see the statement for
so again I have to click here and remove the check mark from the customers whom I don't want to see
their statement I only want to leave Allen checked off after clicking statements available three and
again I want the open items as of this date when I click preview can save and send because you
do have Allen's email address but when I click preview you can see that these three would look
exactly like Allen's open invoice report here's the original it's in fact it's better here's the
original amount and here's the amount open as of the cutoff date of the statement that we put and
of course you could print this and send it in snail mail or you could click save and send and
it would send it to the email address listed here now let's do a different type of statement if we
change it to balance forward but leave the dates the same by the way this will not the start date
and end date will not necessarily affect what's on statement if you choose this statement type
balance forward but just for good measure let's put January 1 of 2017 to January 1 of January 31
of 2017 okay just got to make this 2017 okay now start date and end date click apply now again you
have to click the statements that are available and remove those whom you're not sending it to now
that it looks the way we need it to look we can preview it and you can see that not only is this
every transaction between the start and finish date but notice the balance was three thousand
then we had an invoice for 3900 the balance went up to 69 hundred then we had an invoice for twenty
one hundred the balance went up to nine thousand then we made a payment after that so the balance
went down to six thousand and so on so this type of statement shows the running balance
between the statement dates and the last type of statement that we could send is a transaction
statement and again leave the from and to date for and leave the same statement date and when
we preview this one excuse me when we preview this one make sure you're only choosing the particular
customer whom you want to preview it for and when you take a look again it has something different
this column is now not the running balance this column is the amount applied to each invoice and
it even lists the sales receipts for example invoice number one it was completely paid off
but invoice number five only has a thousand dollars applied to it invoice number seven
has no money applied to it and of course sales receipts are always paid off but is included in
the statement because it is they are transactions that happen between those states between you and
the customer look invoice number 10 has $380 applied so the combination of all three of
these types of statements give the customer the clearest possible information regarding what is
owed and why it is owed from the customer now as mentioned a moment ago the email in the statement
window is not permanent you would have to use the customer records to put it permanently so
if I wanted to email the statement to a customer I would open it up again just like you did before
and notice these two customers don't have an email address in their permanent records but if I wanted
to mail out just for Betty I could in this window I could put Betty's email address whatever it may
be and only in that case if I click print preview it will allow me to preview this statement and if
I click save and send it will show me a preview of what the statement will look like and I can
send it and the reason I can send it is because I had put the email address here but even if I
click Save and I send it unfortunately when I come back to the window you will see that it will not
remember Betty's email address and it will still be missing according to QuickBooks Online what
you would have to do is you would have to click sales and then you'd have to click customers and
then you'd have to edit Betty you would have to click here actually you would have to you would
have to edit the customers record by clicking on the customer name here then click Edit this
would bring you back to the original window where you put in customer information earlier in the
course and what you would have to do was put the email address in the top right Betty at Betty calm
now that's not a real email address but it will save and that means if you reopen the statement
window you can see now only candy does not have an email address and if I click statements available
you can see it remembered permanently the email address for you to save and send the statement