Adding previous balance and/or closing balance to an invoice?

I’m making a custom theme because most customers as for their closing balance be on the invoice.
it should be possible to add the closing balance of the customer just below the invoice total but I don’t know the liquid code for it.

You cannot do that, because the data is not passed to the theme for display. A customer’s Accounts receivable balance is not a variable for a sales invoice transaction. Themes control only the appearance of the data, not the content (with the exception that content that is present can be suppressed).

This issue has been addressed many, many times on the forum.

This issue has been addressed many times on the forum but afaik never with an actual solution.

‘Send a statement’ seems to be the general advice but I’ve found that for some reason, doing this is not effective in eliciting payment from some customers.

As a clunky workaround, I’ve made a Customers Custom Field which allows the placement of arrears information on Customer Invoices that lets the customer know what they ACTUALLY need to pay and this seems to have the desired effect.

The Custom Field is allocated ‘Position 1’ and a Label of <p align="right"><span style="font-size:12px;color:#FF0000">Please also pay the below outstanding arrears, with ‘Show custom field as a column’ & ‘Show custom field on printed documents’ both checked.

This clunky workaround requires the extra step of ensuring that the ‘Arrears’ Custom Field is populated with accurate figures for all Customers, before you produce invoices and this can be done by way of ‘batch update’ if there are a lot. The same html formatting as in the field-label also has to be included when populating the field.

Similar topic. It’s already in ideas and I’d like to implement ability to choose whether to show invoice balance, customer balance or no balance at all.

What would happen if you re-print an invoice - will the balance update ? will it reflect the balance when the invoice was issued?

Not sure that doing this will help - it could easily cause even more confusion

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Absolutely true. This could be a head scratcher unless the customer balance has its own date attached to it.

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Indeed, the issue that we sometimes face is that not all customers want to pay their invoices. While legal action may work for many this is not the way to go. I do not think that an accounting package can really help here except notifying that payment is still due. In reality one may need to write more personal emails or phone the culprits. Maybe even involve a bailiff, even though costly but may help prevent others to do the same. Maybe very wordy explanation that these require actions from the business not from the Manager application. I fear that changes like already mentioned by others will be a backward rather than a forward move.

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@Joe91 @Ealfardan
Re-printing invoices is not a common thing and it shouldn’t cause a problem as we can set the current balance up until the date of the invoice itself. You could name it “Current Balance in [Today’s date]” but I don’t think that would be necessary.

Most customers want to do a quick balance comparison when they receive a new invoice and usually pay all previous debt to keep only the latest invoice unpaid.
In my previous accounting software, I never had issues explaining to customers that shown balance is up until the date of the invoice itself. It was something like this at the bottom
Invoice total:
Previous balance:
Current balance:

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You could use a Customer Statement to do this

Of course, I could print pages of the Customer Statement Report and attach them to every invoice I send. But that is not what I asked for in the post.

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can anyone explain what steps should i do to create that cusom field? especially if i have the same problem and i have to print customer report with each invoice to show the customer balance ?

I support this thinking
Every business has its own way but when it comes to invoicing if there is an old balance of a customer that should be known at that point without searching is the moderate way and thinking

Hi Lubos The requirement of seeing the previous receivable balance of a Customer is growing day by day.
I do hereby propose the following for your perusal
As you have mentioned above need not show the previous invoice or the less: receipt- XXX.
If it can show the closing balance of the Customer statements (Transactions)
And If the Customer has any dispute on that amount we can print and give them the statement.

This will not work as you expect

Suppose you raise an invoice on Monday morning and show the balance on the printed invoice. You send the invoice to the customer

Then you receive a payment and it is recorded in the accounts - the invoice now has an incorrect balance

Similarly, if you raise another invoice on the same day for the customer it will now have a different balance - which is the correct one?

If you want your customer to know how much he/she owes, then send a Customer Statement where it is clear what transactions are being included

I understand that for some businesses this might work, but it is not correct accounting imho

Yes Joe91
You may be correct
I am mentioning about over the counter customers
I forgot to mention it shall not go to print
Let it be only for the information of the user and let him decide to take a copy of the statement, receive payments for the older balance, or even reject the invoicing as the customer has an overdue