The reporting features under Business > Billing are powerful tools designed to help you break down your invoices, track income, and manipulate your data. They also show you a global view of all of your invoices. These reports (and the Sales Tax Reporting Tool) can help you calculate your taxes as well.
Arranged Payments and Payment History
The Arranged Payments section shows you all of your invoices from all of your shoots. You can also sort through these arranged payments by their status - Paid, Pending, Past Due, and Due Today. This section is really useful if you need to quickly see all invoices in a particular status. For instance, maybe you want to follow up with with all of your past due invoices. Running a filter in this section will facilitate that process.
All of the columns (Invoice #, Shoot Name, Amount, Balance, Due Date, Issue Date, and Status) are sortable as well. If you need to jump quickly to an invoice just click on its invoice number. And clicking on the Shoot Name will take you to that shoot's Billing & Legal section.
The Payment History grid shows actual payments that have been collected. Just like the Arranged Payments section, the columns in this grid are also sortable.
These reports update every 15 minutes but you can manually refresh them by clicking the Refresh button.
These two sections give a good, broad quick view of your income. For a more detailed view of your invoice data, use the reports generated in the Income Overview section.
Income Overview and Income Reports
The Income Overview section shows a grand total of Outstanding Income. This is income that you haven't collected yet either because it's past due or pending. The total Past Due income is also listed.
Also, you can generate invoice reports in the Income Overview section. These reports contain a lot more information than what is visible on the screen. They can be exported (to a CSV, XLS, or Quickbooks desktop file) based on monthly, quarterly, or yearly data.
- Payment History: This report is based on when an individual payment was actually collected within a given time frame. It is not dependent on the actual due date of a payment. For instance, if a payment was due on April 20 but the client didn't pay until May 3, the payment would be counted in the May report. Likewise, if the client made an early payment on March 29, then that payment would be included in the March report. This report is ideal to see how much and when payments are actually being collected.
- Paid Invoices: This report is based on when the final payment on the invoice was actually collected. For example, if an invoice has three payments and the last payment is due on March 12 but the client doesn't make the final payment until April 7, the invoice would be included in the April paid invoices report. The entire invoice amount must be paid for the invoice to appear in this report.
- All Invoices By Due Date: This report is based on when the final payment on an invoice is due. For example, if an invoice has three payments and the last payment is due September 7, then the invoice would be included in the September report.
Sales Tax Reporting
For Sales Tax reporting, you can either determine it through the reports listed above or via the Sales Tax Tool located under Business > Sales Tax. This tool calculates tax based on the Accrual accounting method which means the tax is counted when the invoice is created; it is not counted when the tax is actually collected. For example, if an invoice is created in January but the payment is not due until April, this report will factor that tax into the January report. Check out this article to learn more about the sales tax reporting tool.
For those studios who use the Cash basis method of accounting (counting tax when it's actually collected), you can generate a Paid Invoices report to figure how much and when tax was collected. This report will work only if you collect ALL tax as a lump sum on the final payment of all of your invoices. The Date Paid field in this report will be the same day the tax was collected. In that way, you can figure out how much tax was collected in a given time frame. This report will not work if you collect tax proportionally across each payment in an invoice (that will have to figured out manually based on the amounts you've collected in the Payment History report).
ShootQ has even more data available to help you analyze not only financials but also your bookings and referrals in the Analytics section.
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