Processing Customer Payments

[Derrick Ashby]

Neil Williams wrote:

>On Thursday 31 March 2005 7:49 am, Jean Onyango wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Whenever I process a payment for a later invoice (in cases where the
>>customer has many invoices generated for him), the customer report shows
>>that the earliest invoice generated has been settled while this is not
>>the case.
>>    
>>
>
>It should be the case for most businesses - particularly the large ones. We've 
>discussed this here before and although some users want it to work 
>differently, in terms of the needs of the customer business, it is expected 
>that the payments are against the running balance, not individual invoices.
>  
>
It's always dangerous for a developer to blythly make assumptions about
how users are going to use their software based purely on their own
experience.  There are clearly lots of us who want to be able to assign
payment amounts to particular accounts, and have legitimate reasons for
so doing.  It is particularly important in service oriented businesses,
and particularly where you are doing work for bureaucratic organisations.

>My best tip on this is to not take the easy road of having one customer 
>account for all customers. Have one customer reference for every individual 
>customer, even if they only ever have a single invoice each. That way, every 
>payment is correctly tallied against the outstanding balance for that 
>customer.
>  
>
I don't see how this helps.  I certainly have an account for each
customer, but the only way to tell which invoices have been paid and
which haven't is to religiously enter the invoice number and description
at every stage of the transaction and ignore the "Paid" column
altogether.  The main problem is that the receivables aging report is
completely useless.

>The main reason for this is in calculating charges for late payment etc. - you 
>can't charge for late payment on invoice 00010 when the customer has paid 
>since 00010 was invoiced. You charge against what is left after using the 
>portion of the payment that is left after 00010 is paid.
>
>00010  £24 Jan
>00011  £15 Feb
>00012  £15 Mar
>
>If the customer pays you £30, that is set against 00010 and the remainder 
>against 00011, leaving £9 unpaid on 00011 and the entire £15 unpaid on 00012.  
>It means you can charge the customer a late payment fee for £9 on 00011 NOT 
>on the entire £24 on 00010.
>  
>
Well, we don't charge for late payment, but I don't see your point.  If
a client has paid for a later service but not an earlier one, they're
still late in paying on the earlier service.

>Compare it with your bank statement or credit card statement. You pay off a 
>portion of the balance and what is left is subject to interest. You don't pay 
>interest on the oldest transactions only, you pay interest on the *balance*.
>
>Now consider the problems of a supply business where items can arrive broken, 
>missing or just plain unwanted. Returns need to be credited, discounts 
>calculated, you get into a horrible mess if you try and do this against 
>single invoice numbers. It only works if you give your customer a clear 
>report (statement) that says "You owe £xx.xx". Don't tell him he hasn't paid 
>invoice 00024, tell him how much he owes.
>
>As long as the statement shows:
>1. All his invoices for that period.
>2. All his payments for the same period.
>3. No invoices belonging to anyone else
>4. No payments made by anyone else
>5. Dates that approximately match his own bank statements.
>then all is well.
>  
>

I don't run a supply business. Why can't gnucash deal with other situations?

>  
>
>>How do I process such payments so that the customer report shows
>>correctly which invoices have been settled.
>>    
>>
>
>Have one customer report per customer. The customer isn't paying a specific 
>invoice, they are paying their account and accounts have a running balance.
>
>  
>
>>They are bound to dispute 
>>the reports generated for them.
>>    
>>
>
>I work for a business that generates, checks and pays these kinds of 
>statements, invoices and reports on a daily basis. £4,000 per invoice, twice 
>a day times 840 customers. There is no way that anyone can pay invoices 
>individually in the larger scheme - there are always items returned, items 
>broken, credit notes, missing items, extra items, offers, discounts, any 
>number of extraneous issues that change the amount payable on any specific 
>invoice. What matters is the *balance.*
>
>I invoice this customer daily, I get paid weekly. I send them a statement if I 
>have a discrepancy that shows all their payments and all my invoices going 
>back to an agreed date before the discrepancy arose.
>
>They are not interested in working out which invoice wasn't paid - they want 
>to see why there is a non-zero amount at the end of the report.
>  
>
Try to think about the problem from someone else's point of view, not
just your own.

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>  
>
Derrick