Welcome to the Community, dyoung. I'd be delighted to assist you.
Before providing any services, some businesses need customers to pay retainers or deposits. When they invoice customers for services, the money from the deposits is used to pay those bills.
Here's how to record a retainer or deposit in QuickBooks Online:
Create a liability account.
Create a retainer item.
Create a trust liability bank account.
Create a Sales receipt or Invoice for deposits or retainers.
Turn retainer into credit on invoices.
Transfer funds from your trust liability account to your operating account.
Allow me to chime in and provide additional information, SME Expert Bookkeeper.
You're doing a great job. The steps you suggest are correct if the customer paid more than their total on purpose. If the Automatically apply credits feature is turned on, the excess amount will automatically apply as a credit to their open or future invoices.
If it's turned off, the amount will become an unapplied payment that can be applied to the next open invoice using the Receive payment functionality. It just needs to be selected from the Credits section.
The procedure described by my colleague SirielJeaB is appropriate for all kinds of businesses where you ask customers to pay a deposit or an advance fee for the products and services they are ordering.
We thank you for the information you provide, and we're looking forward to you'll continue supporting our product. Stay safe, and enjoy your day.
If your customer will purchase from you near future with this amount. Then the following will work for you.
>Click +New
>Click on Receive Payment under the Customer column
>Fill up the essential information
>Deposit to: Where you have received the payment (Checking A/C, Savings etc) select that >Amount received: Put the amount you have received at your bank.
>Click on "Save & Close" you will get a popup Click "Save as a credit"
Now come to the Bank feed. Match the transaction.
>While you will raise an invoice and take payment from this advance, you have to adjust the invoice and advance payment under the customer panel.
If you need any bookkeeping help for your SME/S corporation then visit the followings.