Is there a way to set the form default for receipts to have 0 for the amount, or have it blank, even when making a new receipt from a sales invoice?
Our customers often have small credits on their accounts. In many cases this is because small change here is short, so if an invoice comes to $58 they may pay $60 and ask that we keep the $2 credit on their account to go towards their next purchase. If their next invoice is for $80, when we create a new receipt from the sales invoice view screen, the receipt amount will be prefilled as $78, being the total for the current invoice minus any credit on their account.
Our problem comes because our staff members do not always check the customer credit balances, and do not always check the amounts that are prefilled in the receipt form (assuming they will match the invoice total). So if neither the customer nor the staff member remembers about the $2 credit, the staff member may assume that the receipt is for the total invoice amount of $80 but not check or edit the amount in the receipt form, and generate the receipt for the prefilled amount of $78 for an actual received payment of $80.
To me this is user error, but despite my best efforts at training the staff members, it keeps happening. I am wondering what I can do to reduce the chances of it happening, short of replacing the guilty staff members. I’m thinking that if there was some way to force the user to enter an amount manually and not rely on a prefilled figure that be enough. I’ve tried putting a value of 0 in the receipt form default, but that doesn’t work.
This does also raise the possibility that the customer credits will be forgotten about and slowly accumulate until someone remembers or notices.
This is a very common people problem. I face that too with many of my clients.
But I don’t think disabling prefilling would be a popular solution with most Manager users. If anything, users are asking for more prefilling.
You probably know this already, but I have to mention that the users could generate a new receipt starting from the Customer Statement (Unpaid Invoices) report.
If that doesn’t work, there’s another idea that you might find helpful:
It’s not the same as no prefilling, but it could be a possible solution since it will start from the Customer invoices page and the user can view and freely select from the entire list of pending invoices (i.e. unpaid and overpaid)
No, I wouldn’t want to remove the prefilling for all users. I like it myself. I was thinking more along the lines of having the ability to set a prefilled value of 0 in the form default. Leaving it blank would leave behaviour as it currently is.
Thank you, this looks like it’s an option worth trying. It also has the benefit of revealing any old debts. Sometimes, again because of issues with small change, regular customers might pay a little less than the invoice amount, meaning to make up the balance on their next purchase. However, it’s easy for us to forget about it, and so we have years-old unpaid debts of a couple of dollars.
Yes, we could write off these debts, and we probably will for customers who we don’t expect to see again. However, most of them are fairly regular customers (otherwise we wouldn’t offer them the option to “pay the balance next time”), so the intention is to just add the debt to their next invoice. The problem is that we often forget to check if there are any outstanding balances. But the Customer Statements (Unpaid Invoices) report will help with that.
I also do feel as @Ealfardan says, But further, I feel that this is where the importance of bringing forward the customer balances to the latest invoice as an option which was discussed earlier