Hello,
Thank you in advance for you time and quick reply!
I used to have pre-payments for my services reflected on Accounts receivable (now named Pre-paids for ease of reference) but with the new update version this disappeared and I can no longer had the prepayments to the account.
I tried it in several ways and when I charge the client, it should deduct from that balance but, it shows that payment is overdue and the prepaid balance is no longer taken into account.
Please help me fix this.
Thank you!
how are you doing this? by receipts? please post a screenshot of your edit screen.
please explain what several ways are you referring to. a customer is charged for services through Sales Invoices.
also, Accounts receivable account is linked with customers. have you set any separate control accounts for your customer? please post a screenshot of your customer edit screen. you can obscure unnecessary data.
I changed the payment methods several times but the issue remains, it does not reflect the balance on clients balance area (pre-paids)
All settings were working fine and without glitches before I updated to this new version.
Client pays in advance and every time I see them I create an invoice that will deduct from the Pre-Paid balance and add that balance to Clinic account, which is linked as income
still not clear what you mean by changing the payment method. anyway try updating to the latest version and check. if it was a bug it should be fixed automatically.
i believe you do this by selecting the income account on your sales invoice which is the correct method. if not, you need to explain more clearly what you meant by deduct and add.
your drill-down on the customer balance do not show any invoices made to the customer. i wonder why.
also, the customer balance is zero. so the prepaids which you believe is a credit available must have been already distributed to previous invoices. you need to check the customer statement.
@Shiatsu, it sounds like you must have updated from a very old version, back when there was an automatic account named Customer credits. That was long ago collapsed into Accounts receivable, which you have renamed Pre-Paids. Customer deposits are now handled as described in this Guide: Record customer deposits and advances | Manager.
If I understand your workflow, you are receiving advance payments from customers, then issuing sales invoices for individual services. So post your receipts to Accounts receivable and you will see negative balances there for the customers. Issue sales invoices, which will eventually bring the customers’ balances back to zero.
The process I was using is the following;
Patient pays in advance and that balance goes to pre-paids giving the Patient a positive balance of $350
Every visit, I submit an invoice to that Patient deducting $70 per visit
Those $70 go towards an Account named Clinic, where it reflected all the visits paid already
At the moment, I am not even able to delete double transactions that were made into the Clinic account while testing how to do this.
So…in order to avoid any further conflicts…
Is it possible to go back to the previous I was using and that was working fine in that matter?
Best option would be to uninstall this one first, right?
If you correctly used a receipt to record the customer’s advance, the balance of your Pre-Paids account would move in the negative direction, not positive. This is because you will be crediting what is normally a debit account. The sales invoices issued to these customers moves the balance in a positive direction, that is, back towards zero, when they would presumably pay another advance.
That is fine. Clinic is an income account. All normal sales invoices must be posted to some income account. This is the credit side of the transaction. The debit side goes to Accounts receivable (your Pre-Paids).
To delete transactions in Clinic, you must delete the sales invoice that posted them there. But you cannot delete a sales invoice that has a receipt referencing it. And, since you have these advances, all your sales invoices will be automatically paid by the credit balance in the customer’s subaccount in Pre-Paids. The only way to avoid that is to designate the receipts from the customers to specific invoices, rather than let the program auto-assign them. See this Guide: https://www.manager.io/guides/10355. Given your workflow, it might be better if you used Special Accounts to separate the accounting for the advances from the invoicing process. See https://www.manager.io/guides/10342.
No. That old version was literally thousands of versions ago. Manager’s newer versions will always open older data files. But in doing so, the database structure is sometimes changed to incorporate new features. You cannot go backwards. A better solution is to get your workflow sorted out.
In that light, I notice several unusual aspects of your chart of accounts:
Cash at bank is a control account summarizing all bank accounts. Renaming it Business Auto Deposits is going to be very confusing to you and any auditor who ever looks at your records. That control account automatically includes every transaction you make in all 5 of your bank accounts, not just auto deposits.
Accounts receivable is a more appropriate name for that control account. Your use of it to record deposits is not wrong, but all deposits are contra entries to it, so the name is misleading. Its function as a control account for the receivables from all defined customers is its hard-coded purpose. You would do better to name it as what it is.
Cash income is not an asset and does not belong on the balance sheet. It belongs on the profit and loss statement, though it is more usual to define the source of income, not the method by which it is paid.
Money spent is not a liability. Spending transactions are going to show up in an expense account (for the debit) and a cash or bank account (for the credit). Both cash and bank accounts are assets.
You may need an equity account besides Retained earnings, depending on your form of organization. Retained earnings is terminology usually applied to corporations. If you are a sole proprietor, you could rename that as Owner’s equity. See https://www.manager.io/guides/6971.
I recommend consulting a qualified accountant or doing some basic research on account structure to help move your chart of accounts towards more conventional design. The good news is that, once you figure out what you want, all you need to do is edit the groups where these accounts appear under Settings.
The process I have been using on previous versions and that has been working fine is like this:
Patient makes an advanced payment and that goes to Pre-Paids Account (original Accounts Receivable), and this will show under “Summary (main page) – Assets – Main – Pre Paids” as a .
For every visit, I invoice the Patient and that amount gets taken out (deduct) from the Patient balance and goes into “Clinic” account.
This has been taken and formatted from a previous version of Manager (19.2.79).
I uninstalled the most recent version and installed this one in order to be able to access this info.
On version 19.2.79, I am also able to see the transaction dates under Clinic account, but on the most recent version this was not possible.
Clinic account is custom account under “Income”.
Pre paids is grouped under “Assets – main”
On the newer version, when I followed the same steps as I have been following from the beginning, it never showed the credit on the Customer balance nor in any other area. I tried Invoicing to test it and afterwards I wasn’t even able to delete those invoices, even by following the steps you mentioned above.
Regarding the “Cash at Bank/ Business Auto Deposits” I can rename that no problem. But since I do receive payments in different transaction methods, cash included, that was the reason I renamed that one to Business Auto Deposits. I do have an account just for cash transactions.
@Shiatsu, I already understood everything you say you have been doing, based on your previous posts and screen shots.
Your last post, however, raises new questions. Version 19.2.79, while hundreds of updates behind, is not so old it would have behaved the way you described. That behavior would be consistent with a version from several years ago, rather than from February of 2019.
Some of your statements indicate you do not understand how double-entry accounting works. For example, you wrote, “I invoice the Patient and that amount gets taken out (deduct) from the Patient balance and goes into “Clinic” account.” That is not what happens. The original advance deposit from your patient is applying a credit to your Pre-Paids account and a corresponding debit to some bank or cash account. (That part of your workflow is murky because of your unconventional chart of accounts.) Your sales invoice posts a debit to Pre-Paids and a corresponding credit to the Clinic income account. So you are not taking anything out of patient’s Pre-Paids subaccount. Instead, you are offsetting what is already there. And because of double-entry accounting, you should expect to see the transaction in two places.
Let me emphasize that nothing has changed in the program since version 19.2.79 that would interfere with proper application of the workflow you described. If you are getting different results, it is because you are doing something else you have not described. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that you are having trouble deleting test invoices.
Spend some time learning the basics of double-entry accounting. I suggest starting here: https://www.accountingcoach.com/. That should help you understand what is happening behind the scenes in Manager and help you formulate questions that will get better answers.
Thank you Tut for your patience (which most likely is running thin by now)!
Oddly enough, using an old version allowed me to get access to everything and I was able to find the problem. When I did the update for the new version, for reasons beyond my understanding, the item that I was trying to add was not ticked to reflect on income, I fixed that and all showed up fine.
Balances now are showing like they used to show before.
I believe that it might have been some glitch that happened on my end when I did the update because at the moment, with the latest version back on, everything is running smoothly as it used to be and with no issues.
With regards to your comment on my lack of knowledge in accounting… BINGO!
I am terrible at that and I recognize it.
I use these same steps that you had provided me with on the following posts
Not sure if I am getting this right but, this is the tree accounts that show on Balance sheet;
Assets
Billable time
Inventory on hand
Main
Business Auto Deposits
Business Cash INCOME
Pre-Paids
Total — Main
Total — Assets
Under Suspense, the only thing I have is a difference of $0.14 that was from a billable time and I could not figure out how to fix that. No problems with it anyway.
Have you drilled down from the Summary page on the Suspense account? That will reveal the source of the error. What exactly did you mean by “that was from a billable time?” Can you post screen shots of the Edit screens for the transactions involved? As long as something is in your Suspense account, your books will never be properly balanced. I realize 14 cents may seem trivial, and it is, but if you don’t understand how this small error was produced, you risk incurring a larger one in the same way.
Sorry for taking so long to reply.
Yes, I got that info from a Summary - Equity - Suspense , and I am aware of the reason why.
Last year, I was sub-contracted and had to Invoice for the time I worked for that Company, those 14 cents are the difference between what I was actually paid and the amount that Manager calculated even with decimal times added to adjust and remove that difference.
I only use CAD , no other currency.
Well, @Shiatsu, I presume you will not be trying to recover 14 cents from your customer (or pay them back 14 cents, depending on which way the difference went). But the proper way to have handled that was definitely not to have tried to fiddle the recorded time into agreement with the receipt.
Billable time can present some difficulties, because we keep time in 60ths of an hour, while you enter hourly rates in 100ths of a dollar. This can certainly produce some inconvenient numbers, and customers sometimes pay us more or less. Here’s what to do:
If they pay more, enter one line on the receipt for the exact amount of the sales invoice, posted to Accounts receivable. Enter a second line with a positive unit price equal to the overpayment, posted to a suitable miscellaneous income account. This way, the receipt will match what actually goes into your bank, but the invoice will not be overpaid in Accounts receivable. Think of the extra amount as a tip. It’s real, and it’s income, but it’s unrelated to the invoice.
If they underpay, and you do not want to hassle them about it, enter one line on the receipt in the exact amount of the sales invoice, just as above. Enter the second line with a negative unit price. This will bring the total receipt down to what came into the bank. You can post the second line to a miscellaneous income account, where it will be a contra entry because of the negative sign, reducing your overall miscellaneous income balance. Or, you can post it to a miscellaneous expense account. (The receipt posts credits, and a negative credit is a debit, which is what the expense account expects.) The expense is also real. You are effectively writing off the small portion of the receivable you did not get as a bad debt.
What does this all mean? You should go back to the sales invoice and undo any fiddling. You want your records to show what you actually billed the customer, no matter what they paid. Edit the receipt as describe above. Your invoice should now be paid in full, the entry in Suspense should disappear, and all should be good.
Based on what you wrote earlier, I assume that after this Suspense issue is taken care of, everything will be satisfactory. If not, let us know.
I just changed the account from Suspense to another Income and those 14 cents are no longer on Suspense. It is such an easy step that I should have been able to do it before… cannot trust this brain on accounting matters.
