Is there a reason why payment of invoices are not allowed to be temporarily collected via the suspense account? The option is greyed out when I click receive money.
I am trying to quickly group the payment of 100 or so invoices into the suspense account before transferring it via a journal account and reconcile to a single credit transaction in a bank account.
I looked through this and the only way to achieve this is to manually create a Suspense account under Equity. Then pay each invoice one by one (which is very time consuming) into this account. Or enter one journal entry with one line per invoice and transfer Accounts Receivable into the Suspense.
Then finally in the bank account receive a single transaction from the Suspense account totalling all the invoices.
It would be nice to have a way to record a bulk number of invoices as paid without having to go through each and every single one of them.
The option is not grayed one. It is default option if you don’t select any account.
Why do you try to group 100 invoices through journal entry? Why not simply specify which invoices have been paid in bank payment transaction itself?
By the way, I’m currently working on automatic allocation where you will have new option to post the amount to customer directly (rather than being forced to choose an invoice) and Manager will then automatically allocate the amount to one or more invoices of that customer automatically.
I know you may not agree, but what I have done is to create a “bank account” called “Pending deposits” which allows me to click through unpaid invoices and use the view and receive payment option to receive payments to this holding account. After that I make a bank account transfer in Manager equal to my “bulk deposit” of customer payments that I actually deposit to the bank (one transaction). This then matches the actual bank deposit transaction imported from the internet bank download file (Manager recognizes it as existing). This avoids the hassle of separate paper recording of invoice numbers from which to either create a journal entry or bank deposit of many lines of invoice numbers and corresponding payments and possible entry errors. This is a way to do bulk deposits in Manager similar to Quickbooks deposits. I don’t like the idea of “automatic” allocation since our customers think in terms of each and every invoice either having been paid in full or not and we must keep track of that and not apply payments to the wrong invoices so to speak. Any thoughts?
Yes this could be a way but I did not want to create another bank account as this reflects on the balance sheet. I prefer to use a suspense account.
As for the default option of “Suspense” this is what I thought initially but when I click next nothing happens? any ideas why? This is why I went through a manual journal?
Also is the “suspense” account not supposed to be under liability?
Automatic allocation will be optional. You will be always able to decide whether you want the amount received from customer to be allocated automatically or whether to specify invoices explicitly.
Anyway, you say you need to match amounts to invoice explicitly because customers think in terms of which invoices they’ve paid. I don’t understand why there is this indirection through “Pending deposits” pseudo bank account.
If customers care about which invoices should be matched to their payments, they will specify this in description of their deposit. Therefore if you are categorizing their bank payment and they specify invoice number, you can allocate the amount to that invoice number. If they don’t specify anything, then I assume it would be safe for Manager to do automatic allocation.
Obviously there is some limitation in Manager that is forcing you to clear accounts through “Pending deposits” account. Can you elaborate what limitation you were trying to address that has forced you to do it this way. Obviously from accounting point of view, you are not doing anything wrong, it’s just that I dislike workarounds and I’m sure there is better way to handle this.
This is just a “shortcut” screen I personally really don’t like in Manager but don’t have better solution yet. You need to select a bank account otherwise what has been happening is that people didn’t select anything and then they ended up in confusion as to why their invoices are all paid and why their bank balance is still zero.
I will try to explain. We do not make individual per customer invoice deposits. We are a small business and in order to minimize service charges from the bank we only accept cheques and cash and recently e-transfers which are by definition a single payment. Mostly we take a bundle of cheques and cash to the bank which are recorded as a single deposit. We use Manager as described above or by creating a deposit directly in the receive money part of Manager bank account with many lines of customer invoices, cheque numbers and amounts to get a total deposit to match with what the bank teller actually deposits to ensure no mistakes. Later when the bank transactions are imported from the bank website, these deposit transactions are recognized by Manager and everything is correct. We do not just make a deposit and wait until later to attempt to match invoices to a downloaded bank transaction. This workflow is not natural and will lead to errors. Also we currently make paper scans of cheques and record invoice numbers beside each cheque in order to be able to correct for errors made during data entry. This is where pdf attachments will be useful when implemented. The cleanest most error free way at the moment for us (no paper transposing of information from one Manager form to another) is to use the workaround as described earlier. This could be less of a workaround if a special deposit account could be accessed (or suspense if necessary) from the invoice view menu rather than a bogus bank account that shows up in reports as etrometer points out. For us it’s important that the workflow is as easy as possible with the software taking care of the work. You may try it for yourself. It is straight forward, each invoice payment is handled directly by the way you designed the invoice module with no extra journal entries or bank transaction editing…and the bank import matching works great. Sorry for long story. It feels like the feature I want (like in Quickbooks) is almost there but is hidden in a way. Thanks etrometer for your question. It inspired me to do this (less than perfect) but very useful (to me) procedure.
Forgot to mention that this extra bank account is reduced to zero when the deposit is transferred to the real bank account (done at the same time for me) and does not affect my balance sheet. Anyway, it also can show me what cheques I have received and need to be deposited and since they ARE received may actually belong on my balance sheet anyway. This is why a “special” deposit account (like suspense is hidden) would be useful I think.
Got it. I’m planning to add new tab called “Undeposited funds” which will be proper way to record payments by customers which are not directly deposited into bank account (e.g. payments by cheques).
I just created an account from the Cash account to be Undeposited funds. And transferred from there into the bank account, bringing that account to zero.
I do the same as @tmtreasurer.
Cash accounts aren’t accessible from sales invoice tab, view and payments, so wouldn’t work for me. Lubos…I hope that new tab “Undeposited funds” will work in a similar way as I have described. ie to be able to select invoices from a list and record payments and end up with a bank deposit that will match a downloaded transaction. No necessity to write down things for entry elsewhere. Thank you.
I thought it might be useful to you if I described what I like about using a pseudo-bank account for undeposited funds with the present version of Manager. I like that when I have a lot of cheques and/or cash to deposit that I can go directly to the Sales Invoices tab and see right away which invoices are not yet paid by a particular customer since they are colour coded with the number of days they are overdue. We make the due date the same as the date of the invoice which tells us how long ago we did the job (cleaning service) for the client. Many leave a cheque for the previous job whereas others pay for the current job. The information on the Sales Invoice tab (unpaid, days lapsed) gives us a quick view of customer payments with no need to look elsewhere within the software. I like that I can search for a particular customer whose cheque I have in my hand to get only that customers invoices and then click on view for the invoice I want to pay, see all the information I need and then just click “receive money” where I have a psuedo bank account called “Undeposited cheques and cash”. I like that I then get a screen with all the information from the invoice filled out that will appear in the psuedo-bank account as a receive money transaction. I just have to add the cheque number or “cash” in the description field and create. I like that I can do many such transactions as I need for each customer quickly from this screen without having to go to the Bank Accounts tab… I like that I can now go to the Bank Accounts tab and immediately see an account called “Undeposited cheques and cash” (the name tells it all). I can then with one click display the previously created psuedo-bank received money transactions screen. I like that I can with this screen to add any cheques or cash payments (using the receive money button) that do not have invoices as yet (it’s my daughter’s business and I cannot always count on her to have done the invoices before she brings the cheques and cash for deposit). I can then do a transfer to the “real bank account” that will match the single deposit made at the bank and bring this psuedo bank account balance to zero and which will also be tagged as already imported when importing transactions from our bank online. I like that I can use the search function to create a printout of the “deposit” I am making at the bank. The teller verifies our totals match and stamps our “deposit”. I like that I can search this psuedo-bank account at any time for deposit dates, contacts (customer names), cheque numbers, cash payments, payments with no invoice as yet (which need updating when she finally does them) because this information is placed in the description field. On the summary page under Cash at Bank there is a line which says “Undeposited cheques and cash” which has “-” symbol and this looks ok to me. I hope this long description may be of some use if it can help improve this procedure within another more “proper” way to accomplish this. Thanks.
Finally, suggestions for what would work for us:
Perhaps a new special asset account called “undeposited funds” for cheques and cash etc. available from the receive payment screen under view in Sales Invoices tab to store cheques and cash payments. This would give us all the flexibility we would need to work with all our invoices utilizing the search filter to create, select, edit and pay customer invoices. Then perhaps a tab for deposits that would have a screen that allows a gathering of invoices for deposit to a bank account which is searchable for all relevant information and includes the ability to add payments where an invoice has not yet been created (happens with more than one person involved in the process). The deposit finally is made when created in a selectable bank account (would appear either as a deposit transfer or something flagging it as part of this process). Cloning would be useful here to ensure consistency in description field to match eventual bank downloaded data as well. That would do it I think.
Lubos, I don’t know what you have in mind for this, but this would work well for us, keeping screen hopping to a minimum and allowing us to go back and find any errors that we inevitably make in the process and to correct them. Currently, if we use the receive payment and manually add lines for invoices in a bank account, we have to keep a paper record (scan) of each payment, assign an invoice number to each and Manager doesn’t retain customer names with invoices numbers and makes finding, fixing, completing “deposits” very difficult for us. We collect these differences for each customer at the end of the year for customer credits, income etc. This psuedo bank asset account eliminates the paper deposit records that we currently have to keep when it becomes necessary to find and correct data entry errors including writing customer names for each deposit line where there is no current assigned invoice as yet…
Anyway, we can always just continue to use our workaround and hope you might consider adding cloning to bank accounts to help with repeated bank transfers carrying the same descriptions etc. Thank you for any consideration of this. Sorry for long posts but I thought I should make my points earlier rather than later.