I have just noticed that if I have do not have the product in inventory items or non inventory items and thus do not fill in the item field for either quote or purchase orders, it will create the quote or purchase order and when I convert the quote or PO to sales invoice or Purchase Invoice, it will then not auto fill in the account column - for example I put in Television Installation in Description - then when I convert this to sales invoice or purchase invoice, the account column is blank and vat field is blank.
It might be my memory, but I seem to recall the quotes and purchase orders having the account column in the past and it makes sense to have it there as that is the original document - I expect the convert to invoice to have all the fields pre-filled. Would it be possible to have the account field put in so that when you wish to do quotes and purchase orders you can set the account and description field if you are not using the item column for that line.
Can you advise as I nearly forgot to add the VAT for the sales invoice as I almost missed it.
Previously you were able to put Account on quotes and orders. This has been removed because from accounting of point of view, quotes and orders don’t have any impact on general ledger so Account column was not relevant on those documents.
So instead of selecting an account on quote or order, it is now deferred so account is to be selected when you issue an invoice.
This applies if you don’t use Inventory or Non-inventory items. If you use items, then account will be selected automatically when invoice is created since it can be deducted from the item.
I agree with you that its not relevant from an accounting point of view as no accounting transaction has actually occurred at that stage. I just wonder however whether this would increase the likelihood of suspense accounts appearing if people miss that some fields are blank when doing a copy to purchase invoice or sales invoice. I nearly missed it myself.
From an end user point of view, it might be more practical to have the account column in at that stage as that is the stage when people are filling out the details - not when they are converting the document to the invoice. People are not expecting to have to fill out any other fields at the copy to invoice stage other than the invoice number.
The bigger issue with forgetting the accounts at the invoice stage is the VAT factor
I understand why you don’t want to put the accounts in for quotations and PO’s and I am happy with that although I think it would solve the issue of suspense accounts most neatly, however can I suggest that you make the program unable to save the invoice until the account column is filled (When you convert quote to sales invoice or PO to Purchase Invoice the account column is blank by default).
Once again I noticed by accident that I had several transactions in the suspense account. I think that the program should prevent people from forgetting to fill in the account field on the invoice to avoid having suspense accounts, especially the vat issues as you might be forgetting to charge or claim vat if the account and vat fields are not required fields at the invoice stage or re-instate the accounts field in the quotes and PO’s stage as we really want to avoid VAT mistakes and finding suspense accounts accidentally.
When it comes to VAT, tax code can be actually selected on purchase orders and quotes.
Also if you are using Item field, you can set up default account for both inventory and non-inventory items so if converting purchase order or quote into invoice, account will be automatically selected based on the selected item.
But let’s say you end up with missing account when issuing an invoice. This is not a big deal. The amount will be posted to Suspense account. Maybe rather than forcing users to fill in something, the software could give you a warning when looking at any figures which could be affected by missing account (e.g. financial statements or summary tab).
Tax reports are no affected by missing account on invoice.
Yes, you can, but my point is that because the program automatically puts in the tax code when you select an item, this makes it very easy to forget to fill in the tax code field when you only put in the description (and nothing in the item column)
I have already done this and this works brilliantly. And this is sort of the reason why I am having problems when I don’t use the items field as I am not used to having to remember to put anything in the accounts column in invoices as it does it automatically. Virtually every time I use the item column, very rarely only the description column and this is why I am forgetting.
No, they are not but if I should have put VAT on a purchase invoice or sales invoice and did not - this is a problem.
Maybe you could make the suspense account in bold red so people notice it immediately as there should never be anything in suspense.
That’s basically my philosophy. No necessarily in red as amounts in suspense are clickable like any other amount and all the links are in “blue”. But subtle warning about the report being inaccurate due to having a balance in Suspense account which needs to cleared out.