Suggestion to link sales invoices to suppliers

Hello, I’m trying to setup Manager to handle spa treatements billing and chargebacks, and I can’t find a proper way to issue sales invoices that ties the invoice to a supplier (the therapist) that will be paid a portion of the sale for the services provided.

Specifically, I already have clients and suppliers setup, and can issues sales and purchase invoices, which individually work well, but I can’t bring everything together. For example, if I record each sale as a sales invoice, I’m not able to add item lines to tie this sale to a supplier, it appears that Manager will not allow me to do that.

More precisely, is there a way I could issue for example a sales invoice that can take into account the customer, the actual therapist (the supplier) that has performed the work, and the amount I’ll be charging the customer and owing to the supplier? I don’t really need to show the invoices to either customer or supplier, but I do need to keep track of the services, accounting and chargebacks. I’m trying to make this work with one global transaction, for example in a sales invoice, as recording that in separate transactions, for example in a sales invoice and purchase invoice, has way too many risks of incorrect entries.

The only way I figured out this could possibly work in Manager is by recording sales as journal entries, where at least I’m able to enter items both for suppliers and customers in a single transaction, but that feels kind of going overboard. Am I missing something? Thanks!

The reason you cannot do this is because it would violate all sorts of accounting principles, in addition to the design of the program. From an accounting perspective, amounts you charge your customers are unrelated to amounts you pay your suppliers. The counter-parties are different. There are no three-way transactions in accounting.

Forget journal entries. That will lead you down an unproductive path.

What you can do is add a custom field indicating the provider to the sales invoice. Then, you could create Sales Invoice Totals by Custom Field reports for various periods, which will tell you what you owe the providers.

Do not be led astray by the possibility of negative line items, either. Those will just reduce the amount your customers owe you. You are going to have to enter separate sales and purchase invoices.

That is why you can copy a sales invoice to a purchase invoice, or vice versa. That reduces the amount of editing and original data entry.

Hi Tut,

Thanks for the response.

I think you might have misundersood, what I’m looking to do is the equivalent of billing a customer for example for materials and installation as separate items. It doesn’t violate accounting principles. Even my old FileMaker Pro accounting software handled that with no issues (it’s just that this software is getting old). I do understand though that Manager works differently and may have some limitations, which is OK.

Copying each sales invoice to a separate purchase order unfortunately doesn’t solve my problem well as it still requires two separate transactions, increasing the risks of omissions that are hard to track, which I’m trying to avoid.

I had looked at custom fields, it initially looked good, but it requires me to produce reports to then figure out the amounts due at each billing cycle, which creates even higher risks of omissions, and of course makes reconcilliation harder since customers (hotels) and suppliers have different terms and cycles. My best option with custom fields appeared to create separate purchase orders for each sales out of that report, but that comes back to more or less the same thing as copying sales invoices to purchase orders (thanks for letting me know about that option though).

Alas, I also considered creating separate accounts for each supplier so I can at least record that in the sales invoice, which avoids all risks of omissions, but that doesn’t allow me to leverage the accounts payable features of Manager very well.

For now, using journal entries is still what appears would do the best job from an accounting point of view, since at least I’m able to record items to both customers and suppliers accounts, but that kind of feels like circumventing Manager’s features, reducing it to simple accounting.

Any chance of just letting Manager simply allow some sales invoice items to be assigned to suppliers’ accounts? That obviously works internally (with journal entries), and for now it would appear the easiest path for me.

Thanks!

Please trust me. You really do not want to try to force journal entries to work. Even if you were temporarily successful, future development would likely break your workflow.

Now that you have provided more information, it looks like billable expenses would suit your situation perfectly. Read the relevant Guides.

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