Advance Payments

I received an advance from my customer for an order which I have completed and delivered. The customer has paid me in full, forgetting about the advance payment.

I have read how to treat this advance payment, from the many topics on advance payment. I have thus created a liability account named Prepaid sales and have selected the control account box and chose customers from the dropdown menu.

For some reason when I am allocating the funds as prepaid and go to choose a customer under the drop down, I get no customers with a message “no matches found”. Is there a reason for this and how do I correct this if I have made a mistake.

Thank you.

You haven’t given enough detail to understand your problem completely. But your reference to a prepaid sales liability account suggests you are reading forum postings. These could be obsolete, as the way Manager handles excess payments, customer credits, and deposits has changed over time. You should instead be reading this Guide: Record customer deposits and advances | Manager.

As for your control account experiment, Customers are assigned by default to the Accounts receivalbe control account. They can only be assigned to one control account at a time. So for your Prepaid sales control account to work as you expect, you would need to edit each Customer individually, changing the assigned control account. But if you did that, your Accounts receivable functionality would be broken.

This inability to have Customers belong to more than one control account is why the entire process for entering advance deposits was changed last July: [16.7.73] Categorization against customer and supplier accounts more intuitive.

So…re-enter the deposit as described in the Guide linked above. You can get rid of your Prepaid income account (after reallocating any transactions that reference it). Your customer’s account balance will be in surplus. You can handle that according to this Guide: Pay a refund | Manager. If the customer is likely to buy again soon and agrees, you can just leave the overpayment in their account.

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If you want to track the amount separately on the BS away from the Accounts Receivable account do the following.

Activate the Special Account tab. Change your Prepaid Sales control account to Special Accounts.

Then create the Customer under the Special Accounts tab, now you will be able to use both Accounts Receivable and Prepaid Sales for the Customer

I have followed what Tut has guided me for this transaction.

However, your way makes it more transparent for me and hence I have tired your version of making it a special account and linking the customer. This customer linkage is however manual as I don’t have a drop down option when I go to create a customer linkage under the special accounts tab.

Can you please advice me on how I connect the prepaid sales account to my invoice or when i receive money in the future after I have done the above linkage in special accounts.

Thank you.

You don’t create a linkage to the Customer, as per the Customer tab but you create a new account in the Customer’s name - e.g. if you have a Customer ABC, then you could create the account called ABC Deposits.

For the Sales Invoice or the Receive Money, under the Account select Prepaid Sales and in the next field select the Customer’s deposit account