Hello allanmichaelbish,
Welcome to the QuickBooks Community! This is a great place to learn more about QuickBooks Self-Employed and get some guidance with the questions you're not certain about. I'd be happy to work with you on this one about setting up 3 payments for one invoice.
With a bit more clarification on what exactly you mean by set up 3 payments, I'm sure I can get you back on track. I'll get you started with what I think you may mean by this question, just in case it's the response you're looking for.
Working with invoices in QuickBooks Self-Employed is a fairly simple process. When you create an invoice, it gets emailed to a customer and then you wait to receive their payment. For receiving the payment on the invoice, it's as simple as clicking Mark as paid manually. If you're using QuickBooks Payments, the program should do that part for you. The thing to note here is that QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn't have the option to account for partial payments, so you can only record one payment on an invoice.
I know this might cause trouble when your customer pays you in installments for the work you've done. One option would be to create an invoice for each payment amount instead of one invoice for the total amount. Another you can consider in this case is manually making note of these payments and then marking the invoice as paid in QuickBooks once you've received all of the funds. That way, you can be sure that the books are accurate. Since QuickBooks Self-Employed doesn't include a reconciliation feature, you don't have to worry about something like this throwing off reconciliations.
That being said, you're welcome to leave feedback about this option if you'd like to see some changes. With the Feedback feature, you can share with our product development team how you'd like to see QuickBooks Self-Employed changed and how it would benefit your business. Here's how you can do that.
- Select the Assistant feature.
- Type and enter "feedback" into the chat box.
- Follow the prompts to leave feedback.
The comments are then forwarded to our product development team for consideration in future updates. For your reference, here is our article about invoicing with QuickBooks Self-Employed: Create invoices in QuickBooks Self-Employed
If you'd like, you can also consider switching to QuickBooks Online, which does have the option for partial payments when you record invoice payments manually. Here are some links that can help you with deciding if this is a good fit for you.
I hope this has helped!
