Idea for other payee list

I can create customers and suppliers, and they show up in the payee dropdown according to their type, but it would be nice to also have a way to control an “Other Payee” list.

For example: We make purchases from a parts company quite a lot, and they are listed as a supplier.

We also make gas purchases at various convenient stores that we have no other interaction with other than cash purchases. Although they technically do supply us with gas for our vehicles, we list them as Other Payee so they do not fill up our Suppliers list.

Would it be possible to add an “Other Payee” list in addition to the Customers and Suppliers?
This would make data entry easier in our case, and it would add consistency in naming.

This is not possible. Customers and suppliers are actually subsidiary ledgers under Accounts receivable and Accounts payable, respectively. There is no such asset or liability control account under which other payers or payees could be created.

Besides, the work of setting a payee up under some kind of Other Payees list would be no different from what is involved in setting up a Supplier. The only difference is that your list would be broken into two separate lists, which would probably make things more difficult. There is no limit to how long your supplier list can be.

Other payers/payees are not currently covered by the auto-complete function, which is what you were referring to in your post. If they were, there would be no reason for a list. Your problem would be solved. This bug is the subject of another topic: Autocomplete for payer / payee missing.

Why have an Other Payee option then?

For exactly the situation you described: the desire to pay someone without first creating them as a supplier. The Other category represents what you are used to. Customers and Suppliers were additions. But in the process of adding them, the auto-complete for Other disappeared.

Create generic suppliers

  • Gas station
  • Convenience store

Or a generic supplier for s chain a stores such as

  • Walmart

Or if you don’t need that much detail

  • Cash supplier

Doing so will enable subsequent reporting at that level and ensures accurate classification of sales/ purchases.

  • For compatibility with old data.

  • To enter barter transactions or similar where there is a different supplier/customer per line item so must be specified at that level not the transaction level.

Not good practice in my opinion.

That depends on your location (for tax law compliance) and nature of your business. For many users, customers, suppliers, sales invoices, and purchase invoices are entirely unnecessary. For others, they are essential.

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Even though they are not the same as AR/AP entities, I believe the ‘Other Payees’ data would be stored somewhere in the DB and be able to CRUD this data to make it easier to maintain things like naming conventions.
It should be able to edit name, have drill down on where it has been used and have some way of preventing deletion if it is already assigned.

So lets say over time you’ve inconsistently used names like ‘Other Eng’ & ‘Other Ind’ & ‘Others Inc’ for the same entity at various times, and you want to clean this up.
First you may want to see where these three have been used.
Then reassign a chosen best name , say it’s ‘Others Inc’ and redirect all from the other two to this one.
Then when the other two are no longer assigned to a payment, they are made permittable to be deleted, leaving just the one correct ‘Other Payees’

If you mean that you believe there is a table or list somewhere, there is not. And no Other payer or payee on a receipt or payment is associated with any payer/payee on any other receipt or payment, even if they are identical. The program just does not work that way. If you want records of payers/payees to be associated, you need to define them as customers/suppliers. Doing so does not mean you have to issue sales or purchase invoices. But that is the only way to facilitate the types of control you describe.

I am assuming these historical ‘Other payees’ are coming from somewhere (a DB or similar) and are being populated as any new ‘Other payees’ are added.

I’m thinking it would be handy to be able to perform typical CRUD maintenance activities on these ‘Other payees’ even if they don’t have any impact on the accounting functions.

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If you want good control of your contacts

  • Enter your customers and suppliers as such in Manager
  • Set the form defaults of payments to supplier
  • Set the form defaults of receipts to customer
  • Use the drop down list and search Manager then provides for you

Just a thought, if the Payee Types were to include Special Accounts, in Addition to Customers and Supplier, the user would be in a position to create special accounts for “Cash” purchases and use this in the Payee field in stead of the Other field.

Can this be considered for an Idea?

For cash sales / purchases ie where the contact is unlikely to be seen again and there is no value in entering their details, the current optimal solution is

  • Create “Cash sale” customer

  • Create “Cash purchase” supplier

  • then use these for all cash transactions. Doing so the appropriate Sales/Purchase component of the tax code is alway used

  • If there is a supplier or customer who’s name is worth entering, then enter them as a supplier / customer. Further details can be added later if appropriate.

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What you see is just an auto-complete function suggesting matches to recent entries in that field on other transactions of the same type. There is no separate list of Other contacts. I already told you that in post #8.

You cannot pay or receive money from an account or subsidiary ledger in your chart of accounts. That is all special accounts are. They are not outside entities you pay or receive money from. They are ledgers recording the movement of money into and out of your business. So no, this cannot be considered as an idea, because it would have no accounting purpose.

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