Processing Purchase Invoices, payments and balance owing

If you go into the Suppliers tab, you can see a total balance owing against them for all outstanding invoices. It would be very handy if you could pay a supplier from this screen. This is from the supplier’s tab:

Or even this screen (if I click on the $399 that’s O/S):

What I’d like to see is either

  1. a method of selecting multiple invoices from that screen above (suppliers) or the one below (purchase invoices) and selecting “Spend Money/Make Payment” that culminates in the correct value of a single payment to pay all associated (ie selected or all outstanding invoices)

  1. I know that I can either go into each invoice and make a single payment and all the fields of the payment are pre-populated (which is what I usually do), or I can go straight to the “Spend Money”, select “Accounts Payable” and then the “Supplier”, but the two problems with this area are:

a) You need to be able to nominate the invoice number or guess which blank invoice # it is (it would be good if the drop down list is only populated with outstanding invoices), or

b) elect to make one payment of an unknown value and allow it to be automatically assigned against outstanding invoices—but in either of those options the outstanding amount isn’t available anywhere on the screen.

What I propose is two things:

  1. In the absence of providing an invoice number, the amount field be pre-populated with the total outstanding amount against that supplier.

  2. When providing an invoice number, the amount field be populated with the amount outstanding on that invoice (it would help identify what the invoice is when the value is known, but the invoice number isn’t)

As a small aside as to when the invoice number is not populated, to have that drop down list item populated with a date or some other way of identifying it. In writing this one line, I have also come up with the idea that when you open the drop down list, that the invoice numbers also include the outstanding amounts at that point.

My point of all this, is that simply, it would be handy if Manager could provide an easy way to total and pay in total without having to generate a list, write them down on a piece of paper, go to the payments and individually pay or line item the payments and copy the values across. It’s just more chances of introducing an error especially since manager already knows these values anyway.

On the payment screen, and inside invoices, I’ve started including the date as the invoice number, only to make it more readily identifiable when trying to pick the right invoice (since I don’t need to have the invoice in front of me to make the payment, I just need the value O/S—the problem is I can be paying multiple invoices for the one supplier at one time.

I’d be interested to hear others’ workflow, if they have a better way of dealing with this.

Are you aware that if you leave the invoice number blank, Manager assigns payment to the oldest invoice first, then the next, etc., until it runs out of money received, leaving the last invoice partially paid if necessary?

Unless there is some contractual reason why a payment must be applied to a specific invoice, it would be normal to consider that money is fungible and you settle the oldest debts of the customer first.

Yeah, When I only have one or even two to pay I actually do that. It’s just that when I’m entering it I have to fumble around to find the right value to enter, it would be nice to have the balance owing automated or someway accessible from the Spend Money area.