Re: Making payments against an invoice

[Iain Mac Donald <..hidden..>]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:21:35 +1000
Ashley J Gittins <..hidden..> wrote:

> 	IIUC, that means that you have "audit control" enabled in the
> system settings, which will stop you from making changes to a
> transaction that has already been posted. In that case, you should
> enter the payment in the Cash, Receipts interface as Chris pointed
> out.
> 
> If you disabled audit control you would then see the post and delete
> buttons appear. As Chris mentioned, this is not recommended (better
> to post reversing transactions instead for corrections, and using the
> receipts/payments screen for payment processing).
> 
Yup that was it! Thank you. I had seen that during the setup but the
implications of it didn't register with me.

I am a sysadmin not an accountant (you probably guessed) but I am
curious how others see the workflow in this situation. Our business is
mostly service oriented and we invoice customers then expect/hope for
payment based upon this invoice. For a select few customers we produce
statements every month which detail several invoices but otherwise the
process is the same. We never have any payment at time of invoice.

I had envisaged a workflow like this:
Produce Invoice > Send invoice to customer
One month later...
Sales > Reports > Outstanding > Select debtor > Produce statement
and/or chase invoice
Once paid the invoice would disappear from the Outstanding list.

Producing Sales Receipts seems to create a balancing "invoice" with the
amount in the Paid column. These then have to be reconciled against the
existing invoices (and I haven't considered what happens to invoices
spanning financial years). I realise rules are rules but his seems like
a lot more work to me.

-- 
Kind regards,
Iain.