Free selection of invoices to create receipts/payments

[Ealfardan]

Currently we have the following options to create receipts/payments:

1. Copy a single invoice to Receipt/Payment
2. Copy the entire statement to Receipt/Payment
3. Manually type in Receipt/Payment detail

Or:

4. Entirely forgo manual allocation in favor of auto-allocation.

The reason an additional method is proposed is that although the automatic allocation (option 4) works well in many situations, in some situations where specific allocation is required and there’s a large number of invoices involved, there is difficulty in applying options 2 and 3. Option 2 is laborious in any case, while Option 3 is laborious when the unpaid invoices are many.

I was thinking if the user was allowed to freely select the invoices to be paid and then click a button which will copy the selection to a new Receipt/Payment.

The proposed placement of this button is in:

• Customers > Sales Invoices screen
• Suppliers > Purchase Invoices screen

The following image illustratesof the proposed workflow:

The green box is for the selection boxes.

[Patch]

I quiet like the format used for bank import and journal entries where a total is entered / fixed and the difference between calculated and entered total shown.

Having a panel showing unpaid invoices and allowing selection / checking multiple could work well with that.

In the current payment entry, maybe instead of showing a drop down list for invoice selection, instead show a panel of unpaid invoices for that customer enabling selection of multiple invoices and resulting in entry of multiple lines (invoice number and unpaid amount).

[jnewman67]

I believe my question is related to the opinion expressed above, so I’m going to add it rather than start a new topic.

I come from the QB side of running a small business. one of my biggest functions is tracking expenses and paying them off - I use a credit card for the purchases. Lots of small purchases, which I enter as separate bills, and then one payment at the end of the month, covering multiple bills.

How would this be done in Manager? When making a payment, I don’t see a way to select multiple bills/purchase invoices to pay at the same time. Am I missing that, or is it a one-to-one process? Is there way to add them to the payment within the payment creation? Or is there a way to mark them all paid after the fact, without linking them to the payment that was made separately?

I’m still figuring out the navigation within Manager, so it’s possible I just didn’t see it or understand how to do it - I’ve been using QB for over 2 decades, so I’m a little used to that mechanism.

The one way I do see to do this would be to just create one bill for the month, and just keep adding new purchases to that bill, then pay the bill at the end of the month. Doable, but as they are separate transactions, it would easier to find them later if they were separate within Manager too.

Thanks.

[Mark]

@jnewman67

How would this be done in Manager?

Nearly everything is clearly explained in the Guides, which should always be your first source for getting information. In this case see the paragraph Payments for multiple purchase invoices in this guide.

[jnewman67]

thank you for the response. I did look in the guides for that info, and was on that particular guide, but I clearly just missed seeing that particular paragraph. And while poking around in the Payment form, the invoice selection option doesn’t appear until you’ve choose the Accounts Payable account, so I wasn’t seeing it there either.

So it’s doable, either by letting it automatically apply the payment to oldest invoices first (logically most likely scenario), or choosing them one-at-a-time by adding a line and adding each invoice.

Two issues there for my situation/use (design bug and suggestion).

First, the Invoice field is not wide enough for the data being displayed - the Invoice number and the description. They wrap 2-3 lines for each item in the list, very hard to read. I had the window open full screen, and 1/3 of the width of that form window was still available but no used. That’s more of a bug or design spacing issue I guess (dynamic widths maybe?)

Second, for more than 5 invoices, this could be done faster by adding a list below with checkboxes to use to indicate which to pay. invoices would be easier to identify (more space), quicker to select, and it would be a more visual way to verify that a bill is assigned to the correct vendor. I also use this feature to reconcile a credit card statement while paying it - I can verify I have all the entries accounted for during the process. This is more of a suggestion, certainly not a bug, but would definitely be an improvement.

It would also be nice to know what invoices would actually be getting paid if no invoices are manually selected, so a list below could be updated with checkmarks when a payment amount is entered, and in the case where a payment might not fully cover an invoice, indicate which invoice will be getting the partial payment.

In my case, I might have 20-50 purchases for a month, but might only be applying a partial payment, and want to indicate just certain items are being paid off at that time (more for logical reasons than accounting purposes).

screenshot of the invoice pulldown and an example of the invoice checkbox list attached:

I’m actually not a fan of how QB sorts the invoices to be paid by Due Date (makes it hard to work backwards to find missing or wrongly assigned invoices), but it does make it quick to reconcile a statement, choose which ones to pay, and create the payment in one shot.

Thanks again for help me out

[AJD]

Have you tried “Create payments from supplier statements” as per the guides?

[Ealfardan]

@jnewman67

I come from the QB side of running a small business. one of my biggest functions is tracking expenses and paying them off - I use a credit card for the purchases. Lots of small purchases, which I enter as separate bills, and then one payment at the end of the month, covering multiple bills.

There are better approaches to be used in this particular situation in Manager:

1. Create a Credit Card as a Bank Account and import the statement at month end. Your payment of your credit card balance should be handled as an Inter Account Transfer.
   
   See the following guides for more details:
   – https://www.manager.io/guides/9240
   – https://www.manager.io/guides/9650

2. Create a Credit Card as an Expense Claim Payer and create an Expense Claims againt it. Later payment should settle the expense claim.
   
   See the following guides for more details:
   – https://www.manager.io/guides/14398
   – https://www.manager.io/guides/6898

I personally find these two approaches more fitting for petty purchases using credit cards.

However, in case you still prefer to raise separate invoices for each credit card transaction, you can certainly use the Supplier Statement (Unpaid Invoices) report and Copy that to a new payment for now until this idea gets implemented.

[Ealfardan]

@AJD

Have you tried “Create payments from supplier statements” as per the guides?

This is the guide @AJD is referring to:
– https://www.manager.io/guides/35478

[jnewman67]

“Create payments from supplier statements”

oh, this is a brilliantly designed solution!!!

a little hard to find intuitively (not directly found via Payments), but I’ll take it!!!

That performs EXACTLY the task I was looking for - it lists all open items, lets me check to see what’s missing, lets me remove the ones I don’t want to pay right now, and lets me apply partial payments.

All that said, I haven’t looked at the other suggestions yet, but this is the function I originally wanted. Maybe it’s not the best way to do this (I’m no accountant), but it fits what I already know and understand how to do. Now to see if the other way is actually a better way from the accounting perspective (accounting is just a necessary skill set acquired so I could run my business

That is a neat little trick - well played, Master Programmer

[jnewman67]

@Ealfardan

petty purchases using credit cards

(okay, the highlite, copy, and Reply to get started with a quoted section is a neat trick too!)

After reading the comments from Ealfardan again as well as the import instructions, I understand how importing a statement would simplify not only reconciliation but also entering all the purchases, but one wrinkle might be that these aren’t petty purchases (food, fuel, etc) - these are inventory purchases mainly. They are items I buy in small quantities from multiple sources to either resell or be part of an item that will be resold. So I’d probably end up either doing a lot of cleanup of the entries to get things into inventory, or with a bunch of vendors with the wonky names that are used to generate an identifier on the credit card statement. Or maybe I wouldn’t even be able to get them into inventory through that mechanism. But it seems safer and cleaner to enter them manually, though I’ll go through the process to see what happens.

The Credit Card - the small business no-denial, no-paperwork, flexible loan solution

Thanks to Mark, Ealfardan, and AJD for the help - much appreciated!

[Patch]

@jnewman67

importing a statement would simplify not only reconciliation but also entering all the purchases

Try it. It is a massive step forwards in my opinion.

• Bank rules can do a significant part of the work almost automatically
• Where there is not sufficient information in the imported data to enable reliable rule generation, the information imported is still accurate leaving only the account allocation as a manual process.

In summary it changes the process from manual data entry to manual auditing prior transactions.

[jnewman67]

So I did try the “create bank account” and import the statement, but 1) that treats all the purchases as deposits, which is the opposite of how they should be handled, and 2) they can’t be converted to inventory items. The import function worked fine, but the result is backwards, and any reporting would show that debt as income. At least that’s how it appears to me - i couldn’t find any way to convert the deposits to expenses after the import.

and the Expense Claims route would just be a similar manual process like creating invoices.

unless i got something wrong (it’s possible).

So i guess i’ll stick with the create payment from statement process - seems to be the most efficient.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[eko]

Please show the edit screens. Also part of the credit card statement in the format you imported into the card account you created in Manager.

[jnewman67]

well, i must have been pretty tired when I did the bank account creation and the import last night, because recreating it today, i see that the purchases and payments are categorized as such - plain as day. I’ll keep playing with it, but I will add the lineitem edit screen here, as I still can’t see how to turn a receipt into an inventory item purchase.

Thanks again for the help - it’s a pretty amazing response from people to help a newbie out. i’m pretty impressed with the software so far

[Tut]

You cannot turn a receipt into an inventory item purchase because a receipt is incoming money.

Your screen shot also shows you have no inventory items created. You cannot purchase items until you have done that.

You really need to read the Guides before going off onto these wild goose chases.