How can i send an Invoice for $0

[OffshoreNW]

I use invoices to keep track of whos is on what trip. I give trips to charities to auction so invoices for these customers are 0 but they need the information on the invoice and I need the invoice to record who's on each trip. How can I send and invoice for $0?

[lilmrsmathews]

I give out free products and rewards to my customers which at times brings the total to $0. The $0 dollar feature would be helpful as I can account for the inventory without showing an actual sale.  Using the cash out feature seems ideal but that will document receipt of a payment and that is not the case. The template is a good solution for now however, I would like to see the feature added to square.

[helloitsme]

This reply created from merging an existing thread: "How Do I Send a Pro Bono Invoice?" The author has been notified via email.

I did work for a Charity Organization and would like to have an invoice in my records for the work I did. They would also like to record the value of my In Kind Donation. How can I send an Invoice through Square when the charge is for $0?

[RAW]

Any chance we will ever be able to apply a 100% promo to an invoice and send it with a $0 balance owing? 

[portproductlab]

We run a job shop which has internal and external customers. We need to track both costs of service and reductions in inventory when we're doing work for internal customers. Need the ability to send a $0 invoice so that both our internal customer and we have all the records we need.

[nika]

Thanks for sharing this feedback @portproductlab. We're continuing to track this popular feature request, and will be sure to update this thread if we hear of any further development.

[dotdotsmiledp]

Yes! this is a problem as I keep track of my inventory in Square and everytime I send a customer a free item due to their loyalty rewards (I"m not using Square loyalty), earning party hostess rewards, donations, contest giveaways or another reason I can't log them in Square which totally affects my reporting come tax time and requires me to manually adjust my inventory (which is another problem because I can't edit the inventory adjustment reasons)  Please add this in!

[Joe]

Hi @dotdotsmiledp - thanks for reaching out and for voicing your question/concern.

You are correct, we don't have a way to send a $0 invoice at the moment. I've cued this up to our Product Team to let them know this is something multiple sellers are asking for. 

If you are operating outside of the Invoice sphere, it is possible to take a transaction and mark the payment as "other" - which could internally indicate to you and your staff that this transaction is simply for record keeping purposes. Another work-around here would be to add an item to sale and then give it a 100% discount. However, this function is only available outside of the Invoice feature as well. 

I hope this information is helpful! Let me know if you have any questions. 

[portproductlab]

@Joe thanks for your note.

1) We're already using 'other' payment type for another purpose (our members have internal charge accounts), and since there's no way to create new payment types, this won't work.

2) If we create a sale transaction in register, and apply 100% discount, can we get an itemized receipt to the customer? If so, this might be OK for us. We're using 100% discount on invoice now, so workflow is similar. I guess I'll just try it and see what happens.

EDIT: I just tried your suggestion of using register. This mostly works, but now I need a way to enter a job description on the receipt. What's the recommended way to do this?

[Joe]

This is great to hear, @portproductlab! Happy that those steps worked for you 😇

As far as entering a job description on the receipt, I would recommend leaving notes on your transactions. If you utilize notes on your items or payments, those notes will appear on the digital receipt for the transaction. However, these notes do not print on physical receipts. 

I hope this is helpful! 

[portproductlab]

@Joe - actually, this is not really working well at all. We've been trying hard to find a reasonable workaround using Register. Here's what we're left with:

1) Since we can't enter a description of the charge on the sales receipt (which we can for an invoice), we created a 'Project Description' $0 item and are using that to capture description. Unfortunately, that description doesn't show up until we go into the invoice detail, whereas for an invoice, it shows right next to the invoice number in the transaction list. This is terrible. It also means that we have to remember to enter a separate item and the description - this means that sometimes this item is buried in the middle of the sales transaction, and it's easy for us to forget. In contrast, the invoice form has this right at the top, and it's nearly impossible to forget.

2) We have already been using payment type 'other' to capture a certain charge workflow (member pays on account), so we're using 'Other Gift Card' payment type to capture these. This is also stupid, and easy to screw up.

Basically, because of a dumb limitation of Square's invoicing workflow, we've created a whole lot of thinking and manual work for our staff. Please don't write off our convoluted workaround as 'working' - it's absolutely not OK.

As you might be able to tell, I'm super frustrated by this. Please just fix it.