I don’t use billable expenses very often—the first and last time appears to be back in late 2014 (when I was invoiced by my supplier) and early 2015 (when I invoiced the client). Only now have I noticed that the sales transactions for these items are both sitting in the Suspense account, and I want to try and fix it retrospectively.
So digging back through the entries, this is what I can work out…
I received two invoices from my supplier, each with a single billable item. For each item I chose ‘Billable expenses’ as the account, and then the correct client.
Then I sent the client a single invoice which included each billable expense as a separate item. (The invoice also included other non-inventory items.) Now it would appear that I used a non-inventory item for the two billable expenses—something I now see (according to this post: https://forum.manager.io/t/non-inventory-items/7344) I’m not supposed to be able to do! And sure enough, the account for each of these items is listed as ‘Suspense’.
However, when I go into the ‘Billable Expenses’ module, I can see that each one is labelled ‘Invoiced’. If I go into ‘Summary > Billable expenses’, it shows that the sales invoice did indeed credit the correct amount to reimburse these two billable expense, creating a balance of $0.00. How is this possible when my sales invoice doesn’t refer to the ‘Billable expenses’ account in any way? Has something changed in Manager since I generated this invoice in January 2015? Were you previously able to designate non-inventory items to the ‘Billable Expenses’ asset account?
More to the point, how do I fix it now so that nothing appears in the Suspense account?
Yes. There have been literally hundreds of updates and several major restructurings of the database and modifications of the ways modules interact since then. Depending on the version of Manager you were using in late 2014 and early 2015, you probably did not use non-inventory items at all, but a predecessor feature, sales invoice items. When non-inventory items were introduced to combine sales and purchase invoice items, your previous transactions using sales invoice items couldn’t be converted because the subsidiary account for the customer under Billable expenses could not be determined.
I’m not certain I fully understand what you’ve done, since I’m reading your description of what you did rather than actually examining your accounting records. But I believe that to fix your problem you will need to be back to the original purchase invoices where you allocated to Billable expneses and edit the line items involved by deleting the non-inventory item and substituting a regular description, which you will be able to allocate to Billable expenses and the appropriate customer. You may then need to recreate the sales invoice involved.
To avoid problems, make a backup of your business first. Then take a screen shot of the full entry screen (which shows more information than a copy of the invoice) as reference so you can recreate the invoice, right down to the old invoice number. That should fix the problem.
Thanks Tut. It all seemed a bit too hard so I buried my head in the sand for a couple of months. This evening I fixed it, and it was extremely easy actually… All I had to do was go into the sales invoice and click the little ‘x’ on each of the non-inventory items. When I did that, the Item field went blank and the Account field changed from ‘Suspense’ to ‘Billable expenses’. Just like that. The suspense account vanished and everything seems to balance.
I do wish I understood why shortcuts like ‘non-inventory items’ can’t apply to billable expenses. I’ve read over your explanation in other threads a bunch of times but I still don’t really understand it. I’d like to have subcategories under billable expenses, and have automatically generated descriptions just like non-inventory items.
