Please see image below. I don’t know if I’m handling the accounting part correctly but I’m sure the balance is supposed to reduce. This client has never ending funds!
I received a payment of £400 in advance of supplying goods. I hadn’t issued an invoice but I created a credit note so the customer’s money was accounted for. The money had been paid by BACS into my bank account although the credit note balance didn’t appear in the transactions of the bank account.
I then forwarded the goods to the customers, and created an invoice which I used the customer’s credit to pay the outstanding balance with.
This was the result. Is it me doing something wrong (seems likely in this case) or is this a bug?
Am I looking at this the right way? Should the credit note amount have shown in my bank balance?
OK, never mind. Playing with things you don’t fully understand shouldn’t be done on a live account, thank God for regular backups!
Credit notes worked far better than I expected. Don’t ask how I created the problem, suffice to know that it was my fault and I now know where I went wrong.
Writing out an invoice and seeing it already paid when the Create button is clicked and the customer credit reducing immediately is great.
Only thing I’m unsure about now is that the Credit Note tab still shows the credit of the original credit note, but the customer details shows correct credit after payment taken. Is this correct from a book keeping angle?
Check your Suspense account. I’ll bet you may have £400 sitting there. I can’t tell exactly what you did, but I think you’ve entered the customer’s payment twice, with the first entry via credit note floating around without the appropriate offsetting debit.
When you received the advance payment, you should have entered a bank transaction, allocating the funds to customer credits. Because you had the money in hand, your bank account balance in Manager should definitely have included the £400.
It was something along them lines. I had entered the money into my bank account as soon as I received it. I then created an invoice later when I’d supplied the goods and selected received money. Of course, then I had the problem that I had a double entry into my bank account so I knew I’d done something wrong. So, after some thinking I decided to create a credit note and use that instead… but I just made matters worse!
So, I reloaded my accounts from a backup and did it the correct way by creating the credit note before creating the invoice… and then, by accident really, discovered how easy it actually is to deal with this situation. I’ll know in the future.
Hi.
I don’t think you should be issuing a credit note, I think you need to allocate the payment to “Customer advance payments” account and select the customer as @Tut suggested.
Customer credits is the same thing as Customer advance payments. I think the terminology was changed quite a while ago. @itmoto, you may be using an older version, or you may have renamed the default account.
Seriously, though, thanks for your input chaps. It’s good to know there’s always help here when it’s needed. Manager really is a brilliant bit of software. I’m no book keeper or accountant but a few ideas and some experimenting with the software and I always manage to end up with a solution. I’ve tried other packages in the past and, believe me, they’re not nearly as friendly or easy to use as Manager.
