In reports I need to subtract something from the sales number

Thank you for your most informative reply.

It might be a little above my head. As each pot of money comes in, it is treated as "sales". How would I change that? I don't know how much of each pot of money is income and which is "client prepaid expenses" but when I am doing the accounting I look at one big number and can say, from another program, how much in total is "Client prepaid expenses". 

Can you please clarify?

Thank You so much

Tom

Thanks for your prompt response, @miner_tom.

Let me add some information on how to subtract something from the sales number.

You can perform daily sales to create a Sales Receipt to include the expenses made by the customer. Also, this can be done when you don't invoice customers and saves you time while keeping your income reports accurate.

If there's an invoice, then you can create a Credit memo with the expense charge item and apply it on the invoice, so it reduces your receivable and accepts payment on how much you actually received because of the expenses made by customers.

You can refer to this article as your reference on how to record your total daily sales in QuickBooks Online using a sales receipt: Record your total daily sales.

Feel free to post here if you need more clarification. I'll keep my notifications open. Stay safe and well!

Jovychris_A

Thank you for your reply. One thing that I am confused about (among other things) is the reason for having to create  a "credit memo". I did watch the video on the link about credit memos and I don't think that I need to give a customer credit. The money that I get from customers is money that they have paid me for services that I have not earned yet. In reality, they are lending me their money. At some point, we earn the service and then we can earn some of that money.

Currently, all of the money that customers give me goes into an a checking account. The "Rule" from this is "Sales".  My issue is that it is not yet income for me so it really isn't sales, yet. 

Perhaps the following would work and I would love to have your feedback on this.

Lets say that I call the money that comes in automatically from a third party program, something other than sales. I don't know what, but just call it something else like "clients prepaid income" or something like that.

Then, every so often, when I know how much money we have actually "earned" (some percentage of the money that we took in) I can make a journal entry and call that "Sales". 

My question is, how would that effect the profit and loss statement? "Clients prepaid income" is neither an expense nor is it income, at least not by my understanding.

Thank You Again

Tom