Feature: Change allocating payment to oldest invoice (for a given customer)

The way Manager handles new payments that are not linked to a specific Sales Invoice, is to automatically allocate this payment to the oldest unpaid invoice by default. In most cases, this is desirable.

However, I’d like to enquire as to the feasibility of changing this functionality on a per-customer basis. That is, to be able to set a specific customer to have their payments allocated differently.

I have a few scenarios where this would be helpful. One of those I will explain: the customer has 2 large sales invoices that are from a while ago that they have not yet paid but intend to pay in the future. At the same time, they’re paying a monthly amount for their current service. I want to allocate their new payments to the monthly invoices by default, which have a newer invoice date.

Two possible solutions I can think of would be:

  • A way to switch this customer only so that new payments are allocated to the newest invoice date by default.
  • A way to flag the 2 oldest invoices as still requiring payment, but that they should be skipped when calculating which invoice a payment can be applied to automatically. That way new payments will still continue to be applied to the oldest unpaid invoice… but skipping these two from that particular check.

The benefit is a reduction in manual work each month. Rather than having to manually edit the payment every month for customers like this to explicitly set the invoice number they are paying against… their payments would only need to be manually edited if they were paying off the old debts.

Actually, automatic allocation is to the oldest due date, not oldest issue date.

You could solve this issue by changing due dates.

Beyond that, this seems like a specialized request with very limited applicability. The potential for confusion would be high because of inconsistent behavior. How would you keep track of selections for various customers?

Your due date suggestion may solve my immediate issue. Thanks for the quick reply, Tut.

Since we are not charging late fees on these invoices, there would be no change to the invoice amount.

It would affect the customer statement report (no longer showing those invoices as overdue), but in my case I think that would be acceptable. Worst case: I need to change the due date back before generating the next customer statement.

I’ll experiment further with changing the due date as a workaround.