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Re: How to handle periodic cash reciepts vs. non-periodic accounts payable?



Hi;

I was thinking about this and I have a few suggestions. IANACPA, though.

First, you are going to have a negative transaction when you process
this correctly because your money received is unearned income.  That
is normal and OK.  However....

The issue you are going to have is that your AR account is deducted by
the amount of the prepayment which is probably incorrect.  It is
probably better to create a liability account for tracking this.
Check the AR checkbox, so that it appears in the AR dropdown menu.
Then you can track the prepayments better.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

On 9/25/06, Richard Ellis <..hidden..> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 04:48:38PM -0700, Tony Fraser wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 13:56 -0400, Richard Ellis wrote:
> > What I can't quite deduce is an easy way to enter the cash reciept
> > from the tenant each bi-week and have it automatically "close" the AR
> > transactions as time goes by and the bi-weekly reciepts "fill" the
> > outstanding AR rent transactions.
> >
> > I tried "spreading" the bi-weekly payment out among outstanding AR
> > transactions, but eventually I end up with a negative AR payment due
> > when the tenant is "ahead" of the monthly rent (because I would not
> > have entered next months AR transaction yet), which then starts to
> > get either LSMB or me confused and messes up the totals in later
> > months.
>
> This is the way I would do it. When the tenant is "ahead" over pay the
> current month. When you do that LSMB will create a new AP transaction
> with just a payment (a credit) for the amount you over pay. When the
> next bi-weekly payment comes you can apply the credit plus the mornal
> payment to the new monthly transaction.

Ok, this is what I thought I was doing when I was entering the data
into LSMB.  I would end up with an open AR entry with a negative
amount due.  So unless I was doing something wrong entering the
payment (very possible, I am not an accountant).

Let me go through was I was doing, and would you tell me if I was
making some kind of mistake along the way somewhere?

First I setup a "customer" for the tenant, so that LSMB would track
things properly.

Then, for the first of the month, I went to AR->Add transaction,
picked the appropriate customer in the customer box, filled in the
date and due date, entered the amount, picked the proper property
rent account, and posted the transaction, without entering anything
in the "payments" boxes.

Next, for a bi-weekly cash reciept, I'd go to Cash->Receipt, pick the
customer, hit update to pull up the list of outstanding AR entries,
and apply the full amount of the reciept to the oldest outstanding
invoice entry.

This appeared to work fine until I reached the point that the next
bi-weekly payment was more than the remaining unpaid balance in an
invoice entry.  This would be where I would get to the "overpay"
situation.  I'd apply the full amount of the bi-weekly payment, and
end up with an AR transaction with a negative amount due.

Now, this is where I got myself mixed up.  I tried several different
variants of attempting to "carry over" or otherwise this negative
amount (which would indicate that the tenant had paid too much) to
the next montly rent AR transaction.  But everything I tried always
foobar'ed the calculations and/or left dangling AR transactions with
negative amounts that wouldn't go away.

So, at this point, assuming I've not made some classic newbie mistake
up to this point, would you handle this part of the data entry for
the values?

> > I've also tried simply inputting the bi-weekly payment as a cash
> > reciept not linked to any particular AR rent transaction.  This works
> > better in that the totals do not get out of whack in later dates, and
> > I don't get confused as to what I've done, but then LSMB thinks that
> > all the AR transactions for the montly rents are "open", even though
> > in the Outstanding and AR Aging reports it shows no total due.
>
> You could go this way too. You just have to create a $0.00 receipt that
> "pays" the monthly transactions with the credits created by the
> bi-weekly payments every so often. The other way just does this as you
> go without creating a bunch of unnecessary AP transactions.

I just tried a couple different ways to attempt to create a 0.00
receipt to close out one of the open AR transactions.  I couldn't
convince LSMB to accept 0.00 as a closing reciept for the
transaction.  It always seemed to think that 0.00 meant I wanted that
entry box to be reset to it's defaults, not an actual, genuine, 0.00
reciept.

So, how do you create 0.00 reciepts, since I've clearly not seen the
way yet.

Thanks in advance for the advice,
Rich


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