A client offers a sales discount to her clients that join a merchants association. She then gives the discount to the merchants association as a donation. What is the entry for these transactions?
It depends on if your client is subject to sales tax rules for these sales, so I can only give you a general overview.
You can post the full sale and on the invoice, use a Discount item. If there is more than one item listed on the invoice, you need to use a Subtotal item and then a Discount item, to get the discount applied to the entire sale.
You can post the sale at a discounted price. Just override the prices on the invoice.
You can post the full sale. When you receive Payment, and it is reduced by the discount taken, you apply the amount of the payment and use the Discounts button to post that a discount has been taken by the customer, so the invoice is treated as paid by two transactions: actual payment and discount taken.
You can issue a credit memo for the customer to show a credited item resulted in a credit on their account. QB will then ask if you want to apply this credit to the open invoice.
You can set up a Price Level named for the merchant association and associate these customers with the Price level. Then, every invoice is automatically generated using the reduced prices.
Each of these methods provides different methods of showing (or not showing) the changed prices to the customers and on reports, so there are pros and cons of each method.
You can read about all of these concepts in the Help menu.
I overlooked the "donation" part of this, sorry. Use one of the methods that posts this amount to an account, such as an Other Current Liability account. Then use Write Check posting from this same account, to pass on the amount of the donation.
