Hi, I have a customer that we regularly invoice up to 1000-2000 invoices per month.
They will pay in one transaction at the end of the month but will send me a spreadsheet of the invoices and the amount. (see image 2).
In the past - we used to do a Unpaid Customer Report - copy to Cash Receipt in lots of 100’s invoices. But that has changed I think last year and now it’s copying ALL the unpaid invoices into one cash receipt. The page won’t load as there are too many invoices. We cannot edit either as it takes too long to process each line.
Currently we are entering each invoice and amounts into lots of 50’s per 1 receipt manually. See photo 1. Just wondering if there is a more efficient way to do this as copying and pasting 1000 invoice numbers and amounts takes a few hours to do.
Note: we cannot do a whole receipt and just let Manager allocate the payment as the customer wants to know which invoices they have not paid. So each amount needs to be allocated to the specific invoice.
Hi AJD, We need to assign to each invoice as I need to send a list of unpaid invoices to the customer at the end of each month. (Not just the unpaid balance) as on their end they need to search for the missing invoices from their own various departments.
You can leave all the allocation to Manager. Enter a single line item, posted to Accounts receivable > Customer, leaving the invoice number blank. The program will automatically allocate the receipt to the invoices with the oldest due dates. Any leftover will remain as an available credit in the customer’s subaccount. If there are invoices unpaid, you can just create a Customer Statement - Unpaid Invoices report. That will tell the customer what has not been paid, by specific invoice.
You have been doing much more work than necessary.
I disagree. Some customers are a pain to deal with. If the statement shows agreed amounts but not the exact same breakdown they have, they will delay payment until our statement matches theirs.
Now while I don’t agree with this behavior, the fact remains that some businesses all across the world behave this way. So unless they regularly settle their entire balance, this behavior will repeat again and again.
This leaves Manager user with the following dilemma, either to:
Lose their customer
Manually write receipt lines which isn’t efficient.
Issue externally generated statements which defeats the purpose of having an accounting software.
There are solutions to this problem, one of them is to change the method a statement is copied to a receipt – which is why I will move this into bugs.
Another solution is to improve on the creation of receipts – which is another topic.
Create a multi line receipt manually then look at with batch update to see what would have been required to generate with batch create.
When viewed in a spreadsheet program each row is a receipt (ending in carriage return). Lines within the receipt are lines within each cell (ending in line feed).
Use a actual text editor (not word processor or spreadsheet) to look at the actual file format.
Given you receive electronic payment data, that is how I would enter these large repeated receipts.
Automatic is very problematic for some situations. I work with a large University who sends me POs. Depending on if they get the paperwork back from the department who ordered the equipment, they may pay a more current PO and not an older one. I need to be able to send them an overdue notice with the specific invoice not paid, not just a total. They will only pay from the invoice itself. I don’t have 1000s at once so it’s much easier for me to handle but just wanted you to realize the ‘automatic’ probably doesn’t work in more instances than you think.
@KrisK, I am very well aware of situations like you describe. In my post #6 above, I was addressing the original poster’s specific situation, which was described and illustrated in considerable detail. I was not attempting to provide a generic answer.
To be clear, automatic allocation to unpaid invoices works only if you (and potentially your customer) are happy with the oldest-due-date-first approach. If receipts apply to specific invoices, they must individually designated. Personally, I never use automatic allocation in any real business. My situations are like yours.
