Basically, you cannot. You could create a separate customer credits account, but it would have no connection to the customer’s accounts. And all customers would be lumped together, requiring you to maintain a separate ledger showing how much of the account’s balance belonged to each customer.
Your best options are those I already told you:
Customer statements of the Transaction type
Drilling down on the Accounts Receivable balance for the customer in Customers tab
All the information is there and easily obtained. It doesn’t show separately on the balance sheet, but is actually more usable for management decisions because you will see what each invoice, payment, refund, or credit was for.
Well it’s been many moons, much water under the proverbial bridge and quite a few software iterations, and this feature/process doesn’t appear to have changed.
I’m now helping a customer move over from another accounting package (no names mentioned) and his major concern right now is the ability to allocate bulk payments to specific invoices rather than having them “automatically top up” outstanding balances.
He has a number of customers who process their invoices asynchronously, so he might have issued invoices #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6 to them (let’s for simplicity’s sake say that each invoice is for $100) and received a bulk payment for invoices #2, #4 and #5 only. Using the current “credit to customer rather than invoice” methodology, invoices #1, #2 and #3 would be cleared by Manager - giving an inaccurate overview as to which invoices have been paid.
Now if we were only dealing with a handful of invoices as given here, it would be relatively easy to simply enter receipts for each invoice separately - but in this case he’s dealing with dozens of invoices from one customer, so manual receipt-per-invoice entry would become rather tedious.
So… Is there any easier/quicker way to allocate receipts against specific outstanding invoices?
If not, the feature request component of my post would come in…
Given that Manager knows which customer the receipt is being created for (it will happily complete the “Payer” field based on partially-entered text), is there a possibility to make available a list of the outstanding invoices for that customer as a drop-down for the “Description” field?
Not currently, however what you are suggesting is a “bulk” update process.
From the Customers tab you would click on a Customers balance which lists all the unpaid invoices, then you would click a “New Receipt” button and then click a “tick box” next to the invoices being paid.
@Cognicom, I didn’t see your November 8 post when it was originally put up because I was traveling. I think your client is more worried about the situation than is warranted. It actually isn’t very hard to do what they want.
When a receipt comes in for multiple, specific invoices, choose any one of them to view and click New Receipt. That will populate all the customer information, plus the financial information for the designated receipt. Then, just add lines for the other invoices. Since the ultimate customer has designated which invoice numbers are being paid, selecting the invoices wouldn’t be hard. (The troublesome situation would be when they don’t specify invoices and you have to first go on a treasure hunt to figure out which unpaid invoice(s) match(es) the amount. The situation I’ve described might actually be simpler than bringing up one screen with a list, checking off the desired invoices, then creating the transaction. It’s important to stress to them that there is no need for multiple transactions, which would be tedious, just additional line items.
I think so too. What you’ve described is precisely how I handle simultaneous receipts for multiple invoices and how I instructed the customer to do them - but I think the biggest problem he has is simply “that’s not how I used to do it in MYOB.”
I know all about the “old dog, new tricks” syndrome - but he’s a decade younger than me and I’ve had no problems adjusting to different methodologies/techniques/features. Maybe I should update my customer contracts to include a clause that allows me to slap them when they’re being silly?
This is something that has been requested before. There are two aspects of this approach that render it problematic from your client’s perspective:
A dropdown only lets you choose one item in a list at a time. So multiple line items are still necessary.
Manager’s handling of overpaid invoices would be negated. The point of the overpaid feature was to handle situations such as the customer specifying two receipts against the same invoice. If you are not allowed select paid-in-full invoices, you would end up with the receipt being applied to another invoice, either one currently open or a future one. That could result in a rolling wave of receipt misapplications that would be difficult to untangle. By allowing posting to already-paid invoices, any mistakes are confined and easier to correct.
