I have searched the forum and the guides, but did not find what I exactly I am looking for.
For example. I have 20 customers that buy a “service” from me on a monthly basis. These 20 customers buy the exact same product, so the item and the income account stays the same.
All 20 customers pay on the same date. (via debit order)
I have tried to batch update the sales invoices but without any success.
Is there a function or possibility that I can “batch pay” all 20 invoices?
Set up recurring invoices for each
if you import your bank statements, set up bank rules for each.
if bank import is not feasible for you, batch create may achieve what you want. Use batch update of last month to create a template.
@ZAFMike, consider whether you need sales invoices at all. Your customers are not buying on credit. Why not skip the sales invoices and just record receipts? See Make cash sales (sell without sales invoices) | Manager. A monthly bank statement import could be all you need.
I would love to abandon any invoices, but by law, I am required to issue an invoice for every transaction. So if I have a 100 clients, I need to issue a 100 invoices. And then there is also quarterly statements that are sent out.
As I mentioned, all the invoices are paid on the same day via automated debit order. So if I could find a method to enter a batch payment.
I am trying to get my head around this. I will ask my auditor for some additional advice.
Thanks for the help so far.
@ZAFMike, do you realize that if you follow @Patch’s advice—setting up recurring sales invoices for all our customers, when they come due, all recurring invoices will be generated at the same time by one click of a button? Read the Guide: Set up and manage recurring sales invoices | Manager.
The bank statement import (with well-constructed bank rules) will take care of receiving all automated debit orders.
This is one case where your auditor will have no advice to offer. You just need to understand Manager’s features.
When you sign up a new customer, you will have to do two things:
Everything else will happen once per month in generating sales invoices and importing the bank statement. Both those are single actions. The biggest work will be sending out invoices. But you are presumably doing that already.
Hi Tut
Thank you for the reply.
I do know about recurring invoices. I am already doing that. And it is a great feature.
About the bank rule, as far as I can see, you can only allocate the transaction to an income or expense account and not an individual invoice.
I tested it with a dummy company and played around with it, and even if I allocate the funds received to the same account which the invoices are assigned to, it just shows that amount as income, but the individual invoices remain un “unpaid” status.
I think there should be an option then when you create a bank rule, it should not only assign the transaction either to an account, or an invoice. That way the chart of accounts and the invoice will be updated.
Maybe I might be missing something, or I might be wrong.
Partially true, but functionally false.
You can allocate a receipt via a bank rule to Accounts receivable and a specific customer:
Because bank rules are meant to be lasting, you cannot allocate to specific invoices. (That is the true part of what you wrote. The part about only being able to allocate to income or expense accounts was false. Be sure to scroll down far enough in the dropdown menu to see all accounts.) Manager will automatically post an undesignated receipt to the oldest unpaid invoice. In your case, you should only have the most recent invoice still unpaid when you open when you import your statement. So as long as the bank rule can identify the customer, everything should work.
@Tut, thank you for the info. I completely understand what you mean.
I think this is more of a procedural thing on my side, seeing that the bank deposit descriptions contains invoice references, so basically it will change every month. I will have to change that so it contains the customer.
Thank you very much for the help. Much appreciated.
This is the key to what I mentioned previously—well constructed bank rules. You need to find something that consistently identifies your customers. That can be difficult in a situation like yours, because they will probably be using different credit card processors who may pass different information in different formats to your bank. I’ve seen bank statements that look as though they were manually keyed in by a group of clerks all using their own, made-up rules for abbreviations, information selection, etc.