Is it ok to change the amount on the purchase invoice when selecting a purchase invoice item where the price has changed.
For example, my phone bill could be £10 this month, but next month it could be £12.75 and the next month it could £8! I assume that we need to create a purchase invoice item such as BT Phone Bill for whatever amount it currently is, and then on future invoices we can just change the amount on the actual purchase invoice. Or do we need to go into purchase invoice items, change the price there and then do a purchase invoice and select the purchase invoice item with the updated price. I assume that this won’t change purchase invoices which have the old price?
To the best of my knowledge you would only use purchase invoices for stock or items you will later resell , for bills etc you will want to use the ‘Spend Money’ feature under the appropriate cash or bank account, this will log it as a journal entry in the appropriate ledger and also mark it as an expense under the liabilities column, from here you can clone the entry for each month and adjust the date rather than having to re-enter the transaction.
Does this make sense? i am merely a struggling user such as yourself!
Thats very interesting. If the purchase invoice item is only for resale stock, it would make more sense to use inventory for that! Although you may have a point as sales invoice items can only be for sales. I think the purchase invoice items was implemented before inventory and disbursements were implemented so this might be why.
I will look at the option to spend money without creating an invoice although I might stay with purchase invoices for bills because I like to print out an invoice for each payment. I am getting an accountant to come in soon, so I think that this will be another question I need to ask him.
I use purchase invoices for services such as telephone bills. I see it that I am buying a service from a provider. By selecting the account category to, say, telephone services in this case ensures that accounting is correct as far as expenses, etc. are concerned.
Just because I buy a product doesn’t mean I necessarily intend to sell it again. I may be buying tools for my business, for instance. If I buy all my tools from a single supplier it makes sense to set them up as a supplier. Later on I may wish to just look at what I’ve spent with them so can use the supplier tab to allow me to just view transactions with them.
I believe the spend money option is just a quick way to enter a transaction without the necessity to set up a supplier first. Otherwise all accounting transactions should still work the same.
Purchase Invoices tab is not just for purchasing inventory. It’s for recording any purchase on credit. That includes phone bills too.
You don’t need to use “Purchase Invoice Items” at all. This is for auto-complete purposes only. Just select the expense account Telephone, enter the amount (tax code if applicable) and that’s it.
I have tried the spend money option and it is quite easy to do it that way and obviously you can clone the payment. For me, the problem with that approach is that I cannot track how much I have spent on that supplier unless they are the only one using that specific expense account. I understand that a purchase invoice is meant for paying on credit, but it also makes it easier to keep track of expenditure per supplier. I think that I will just create a purchase invoice and change the amount every month as most of the autocomplete work is done.