Streamlining workflow for paying suppliers

Currently you can still only pay one invoice at a time* and since my OCD requires my cash account in manager to mimic my payments out through my bank, I either:

  1. have to make multiple payments with my bank to the supplier for each invoice and then duplicate that in manager by spending money against each invoice (this is how I usually do it), or

  2. create a single payment through Cash Accounts | Spend Money to the supplier (ie selecting Accounts Payable and the supplier and then either leaving the invoice field blank and having it auto-allocate, or

  3. following on from above, create multiple line items for the invoices I want to allocate the monies to.

I would like to do it the third way, however the problem with that is that there is no way to automatically bring in the value of the invoices into the Spend Money transaction. Nor is there a way to see from this screen which invoices are unpaid or how much each one is.

I don’t have multiple monitors, and I often don’t work with paper invoices in front of me, and it’s a bit of a guessing game (or requires remembering invoice numbers, or alt-tabbing between windows/tabs) and/or have a supplier statement report open. You also have to manually enter the details which can lead to typing errors. If you do make an error, it’s likely to be replicated in your online banking transaction.

It would be advantageous when selecting the invoice (where you’ve manually added more line items) that either ONLY unpaid invoices are in the dropdown, and/or the amount of each invoice appear with it. Then when populating the invoice number, it would again reduce the chance for error if the value of the invoice is automatically entered into the unit price field. If you’re only going to make a part payment, you could then manually enter a new value.

An alternative would be from the purchase invoice screen (or from the supplier screen to limit payments to one supplier at a time) to be able to select multiple invoices to bulk process. This could then automatically create a Spend Money with multiple line items automatically populated with the correct invoice numbers and payment amounts.

It’s not uncommon for me to pay 3-5 invoices each week for one supplier. As mentioned above, when I log into online banking, I actually pay each invoice, creating 4 or 5 payments to one supplier, all in an effort to keep the bank reconciliation tidier. It would be much easier if batch processing or some other streamlined method was available.

There is. Look at the Accounts payable balance for the supplier in the Suppliers tab. Make a single payment for that amount, posted to that supplier’s account in Accounts payable, but leave the invoice number blank. Manager will automatically allocate the payment to open purchase invoices in order of issuance. Those automatic allocations will show wherever relevant. And you will have one payment in Manager to reconcile with one payment on your bank statement. That’s a lot easier than entering multiple payments for the supplier per week.

Yeah ok.

If that was the answer, I’d do it that way. But I as well as many others have found automatic payments the cause of more problems than they’re worth. I much prefer to allocate them manually.

And before you ask this can be for a multitude of reasons:

  • early part payment
  • agreed late payment / backshipped items
  • out of sequence invoices
  • credit notes
  • other stuff I know nothing about :slight_smile:

you name it, I’m a small player with little experience, but I along with others here have an aversion to automatic payments. They always seem to be the most difficult to reconcile. ← I admit that’s probably partly because I’m still learning