Hi PMoore1,
Thanks for joining us here in the Community again. Creating a credit memo in QuickBooks Online is a great way to keep track of the credit that you've given to your customers. I'd like to go over the options you have for creating and applying credit memos, as well as another option that might suit your business' needs.
A Credit memo is created from the + New button and can only be applied when recording a payment towards a customer's invoice. Another option that may work for you is a Delayed credit. A delayed credit can be added to an invoice as a line item. After creating the delayed credit you would simply need to open a new invoice, select the customer, and any unapplied delayed credit will appear on the right. The article below gives you all the steps for how to create and apply a delayed credit, as well as the difference between a credit memo and a delayed credit. It's a great resource:
I know that having the option to create a credit memo directly from an invoice or estimate would be handy feature that other QuickBooks users would benefit from as well. I encourage you to submit feedback on this to our product development team. Do so by navigating to the Gear icon, then selecting Feedback. This is a great way to have your voice heard and ensure our engineers know what features to add next.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Have a great day! :)