I have a customer who has five outstanding invoices.
I received payment for the two oldest invoices today.
As I’ve always done I just entered it into Bank Transactions > Receive Money and allocated it to Accounts receivable.
Manager used to automatically allocate it to the oldest invoices first…now it allocates it to the most recent invoices first.
By design, Manager automatically applies receipts from customers or payments to suppliers to the oldest unpaid sales or purchase invoice if a specific invoice is not chosen during account selection:
Does not seem to apply now…a bug?
I tried to duplicate your problem but could not. But things were worse than you describe. I tried to enter a receipt through Bank Transactions and a customer with 7 unpaid sales invoices did not even appear in the Customer dropdown list. I tried with another customer and that one appeared and the receipt was automatically allocated to the oldest sales invoice first, as should be.
So something is causing unstable behavior. I am elevating this to Bugs status.
All customers should show regardless how many unpaid invoices they have. The only time customer wouldn’t show in the list is if they are marked as “inactive”. Is this the case?
You responded before I could delete my post. It turns out the particular customer I chose was assigned to a custom control account instead of Accounts receivable. When I cleared that up, everything behaved as it should. Receipt was applied to oldest invoices first.
So I’m removing the Bugs categorization unless someone else can reproduce the problem.
This is not enough information to see the problem. What would help is a drill-down on the Sales Invoices figure under the Customers tab. That would show date and status of all sales invoices for this customer. If the problem you are reporting is real, you should see newer invoices paid off and older ones still unpaid.
The Customer statement doesn’t show how much was originally due. Nor does it show invoices that have been paid off. A more helpful statement would be the transactions type, which should show the automatic allocations. The type you have shown only lists unpaid invoices.
Well, I just learned something. And just to be clear: is allocation to all invoices with due dates in order of oldest due date, and only then to any invoice without due date in order of issue date? That’s how I interpret what you wrote.
Technically, automatic credit allocation is always by due date. If due date is not specified then Manager will use issue date as due date.
In this case, because due date wasn’t specified on invoice 4526, Manager assumed due date is on the same date as issue date - 24/08/2017 which was earlier than any other invoice coming due (as other invoices had due date specified).
I forgot why is it this way but I think it has something to do how many businesses don’t use due dates and when they do on occasional invoice, it doesn’t get matched against payments from customers earlier than necessary.
By the way, I’m currently working on slightly different approach to automatic credit allocations. The idea is good but the implementation is causing too many issues all over the place. New approach should retain the benefits while giving more transparency into the allocation process. Right now it’s “too magical”.
My assumption was that if I didn’t enter a due date, then the due date was the same day as the issue date. I think this makes sense, as many invoices are assumed to be due immediately if no due date is provided.
It sounds like this is how Manager already works, and also how it allocates funds when no invoice is specified. This is good.
If the approach to automatic credit allocations is changing, I hope it keeps this particular behaviour (mentioned above) the same.
The current logic makes perfect sense to me. I just never saw it in action because I’m one of those users you describe who normally doesn’t put a due date on invoices (because my clients can’t pay me until they get paid by their clients). I had seen the “oldest first” explanation so many times I thought that is how the program worked. Basing it on due date seems much preferable.
