Work Around for Showing Service Date on P & L Instead of Invoice Date 

For Accrual Revenue Recognition Purposes

• Create an Estimate for your customer as usual. 
• When it's Approved and the Service Date is set, Create a zero amount Invoice for that customer. You can list the products and services that are agreed upon from the estimate, just make sure the amount column is zero. 
• This will set the Date for recognizing the revenue on your Profit & Loss Statement for the actual Date of Service, not the date you get around to sending an invoice or when the client actually pays the invoice.
• Then when the work is completed and you have all the information and amounts for the work, you can go to the Zero Amount Invoice and enter in the cost for the items, plus add any additional products and services that were done until the Invoice shows the correct amount.
• Click Save, or Save and Send. 
• When it asks if you are sure you want to make changes to this, click Yes.
• Done 

You can run your P&L and see that your revenue is now properly recognized as of the date you actually earned it (in this case the service date). Hope this helps.

I realize this is just a Band-Aid solution to a very serious flaw with QuickBooks.

I would much rather see QuickBooks add this as an actual feature / option. You should be able to select whether or not you want to recognize revenue as of service date or invoice date for cash basis vs accrual basis. It really seems like something that should have been available from the start.  

I really hope they add it.