Bug allows deletion of sales invoice with future receipt allocation

Good day folks. I managed to delete an invoice that had a payment allocated against it. I am surprised that it did.

This is my situation. Rent is invoiced in advance. Jan 2017 rent is invoiced mid Dec 2016 using an invoice dated 1 Jan 2017. Tenant paid 26 Dec 2016. I allocated the receipt via the outstanding invoice. I wanted to change the receipt date but could not figure out how. I then deleted the invoices which had “Paid in Full” stamped on the bottom. This should not have happened as I had not deleted the receipt. I have since deleted the “receipt” separately from the bank transaction.

Now I want to re-instate the original invoice for the rent as the tenant has the number 128 on his statement and if I create a new Invoice it will have a different number.

What to do?

I think I found the answers to my own questions. There are two solutions.

  1. Restore from backup - however there were too much catching up to do.
  2. I recreated the invoice and discovered I can manually enter in the original Inv # 128.

This is great in this instance but not very good for internal control. From an fraud/auditing
perspective this is dangerous.

I moved this problem to a new topic and elevated it to bug status. I was able to duplicate this problem. You are right, @Brian_Keegan. Manager should never have allowed deletion of the sales invoice, since it was already the object of another transaction, even though a future one.

This is a feature. Manager is not going to stop fixing errors. As for internal controls, I agree but this is something audit trail will cater for.

@lubos, you have addressed @Brian_Keegan’s original misconception about not being able to edit invoice numbers. And, of course, you are right that this is a feature.

The behavior that caused me to elevate this as a bug was that you an delete a sales invoice that already has a receipt allocated to it. Surely this should not be allowed.

One thing has changed. Previously, when you selected Accounts receivable account, then you had to select an invoice. If invoice was deleted, then Manager wouldn’t know where else to allocate this amount at all (other than Suspense account). So it wasn’t possible to delete the invoice if it had payments allocated against it.

This has changed though. Now you need to select Accounts receivable, then Customer and then optionally an invoice. If invoice is deleted, Manager will still allocate the amount to the customer. So deleting invoice would no longer send the amount paid to Suspense account therefore invoice is allowed to be deleted.

The point is, I don’t really want Manager to fight with users unnecessarily. Sure, if you want to delete a customer which has 20 invoices, sure… Manager will fight against that. But if you want to delete single invoice, I think Manager should just accept that decision. It won’t throw anything to Suspense account as a result of that decision.

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OK. That makes sense. I hadn’t thought through that use case.

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