If you don’t have a whole lot of referral fee activity by one person to justify tracking by sales rep, create a credit memo for the referral fees. Set up a service item called Referral Credit, associate it with an expense account called Commissions and Referral Credits. A warning will pop up that the item is associated with an expense account, Do You Want to Continue, say Yes. Another window will pop up when you are done asking if you want to Retain the available credit, Issue a refund, or Apply to an invoice. You can apply to existing invoices or print the check at that time.
To issue a refund check at a later date, go to customers, go to the customer that has the referral credit you want to process, click on the credit memo, and when you unclick to be printed, save and close, the window will come up again asking if you want to Retain for later, Issue a refund, or Apply to an invoice. When you select issue a refund, another window pops up where you can assign a check number for a manual check or to print the check through QuickBooks.
To apply to a new future invoice, create the new invoice and when you go to save the invoice, a window will pop up asking if you want to apply the credit you created with the credit memo. Select Yes, and the credit memo will pop up in a separate window, check the credit to be applied, and it will be applied to the current invoice.
I would keep an excel file to track which ones have been paid or applied referencing the check or invoice number that the credit memo was applied against.
A second way to accomplish this task, if you get several referrals from particular people (like a sales team), use the sales rep feature in Quickbooks. When you create invoices for referred customers, assign the customer to which you will apply the referral credit as the sales rep on the invoice.
You can then use the sales by sales rep report to calculate the commission when you are ready to apply credit to invoice. You can create an item called referral commissions and put the commission amount in as a negative number on the referring companies invoices. If sales taxes apply, make sure you take that into account properly.
Again, I would keep an excel file to keep track of exactly which invoices have had the commission paid on.
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