How do I deal with customer non-payment?

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:11:26 +0800 Zhang_Weiwu <zhangweiwu at realss.com> wrote:

> 
> There are two customers
> 
>  1. One paid full amount, but I only received 95% because the bank took
>     the rest as overseas transaction fee. So there is a difference on
>     invoice sum and on "Payment Information - Amount" (of Process
>     Payment dialogue). The 5% is clearly an expense.
>  2. The other simply refused to pay and I decided to account it as a
>     lose. The status is invoice posted but not paid.

Not sure how to deal with this.

> 
> 
> So how do I do it? Whatever I do with it I always ends up getting report
> wrong.
> 
>  1. I can simply make a transaction decreasing account-receivable and
>     increasing Expenses:Bad Debt, but this doesn't change
>     receivable-aging report. It's silly to see receivable-aging keeps
>     reporting a lose that antedates by years.

No, you don't want to do that...

>  2. I can un-post both invoices but that way the financial lose is not
>     reflected on Incoming/Expense report.

Yes, this is a problem, so you probably don't want to do this either.

>  3. I can un-post the first invoice and add a negative item to it to
>     balance the 5% transaction fee, so that the sum agrees the income,
>     and post it again. But I cannot do this to the second invoice as
>     would result wrong Income/Expense report.

What you do is do a process payment for the full ammount -- this clears
up the invoice -- eg it is paid and the accounts reveicable is cleared
/ balanced.  Then you expense the overseas transaction fee, as a
separate transaction.  This ends up becoming a general business expense.
Maybe create a special account for this to account for it.  "Cost of
doing business overseas."

> 
> What do you suggest me to do? Thanks in advance!
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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