Allocating funds received against supplier credit notes

Problem reported by Shamim Sarif 10 years ago

I received a supplier credit note in December 2014 which I posted to the ledgers. The actual funds to offset against the credit note was credited to the bank account in January 2015.

When I tried to allocate the funds received against the credit note in Clear books, the method of posting a refund meant that I would have 2 credits in my supplier ledger. This is clearly wrong.

The support team said that I had to delete the previous credit note, then post the bank refund which will create an automatic credit note. This is also clearly wrong on many levels.

First the credit note was received and posted in December 2014. Deleting it would change values on the Aged Creditors report, VAT control, and Purchases. I cannot post the bank refund in December 14 as it was received in January 2015, and posting it this way would mean the bank reconciliation for December would be wrong.

I have been raising this issue with Clear Books support for sometime and all I keep hearing is that "our consultant accountant agrees with you and the matter is with our development team". How long does it take the development team to address this issue. Clearbooks recommended method of posting supplier credit note refunds is wrong on the basic bookkeeping level and should be amended immediately.

Solved
supplier
CreditNotes
credit
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2 Replies

I totally agree this has been an issue for far too long

10 years ago

Hi both

Might help to put some historical perspective on this.

When I started out all purchase "bills" were entered in the books and then paid off, even if they related to say one off cheque (or even cash) payments made on the date of purchase. These days however with direct debits and debit cards, more and more expenditure is incurred and paid off on the same day and so systems have enabled "cash book" payments, ie the bank payment goes straight to the expense account without the bother of a bill first.

Clear Books is unusual in combining these in that, if you enter an expense transaction straight out of the bank account it actually creates a dummy bill and pays it off. Similarly money received directly as income will generate a dummy sales invoice and pay it off. So the refund system just follows the same principal, ie it generates a dummy credit note and pays it off.

I'm not saying this to justify what happens, it is clearly wrong not to enable the allocation of a payment against a credit note and certainly, if invoice accounting, this method can cause timing differences in the VAT return.

What it does explain however is that, despite you, me and several other users pointing out that CB should fix this, many thousands of users, over perhaps 6-7 years have not seen a problem and so it's priority has to be seen in that light.

Shamin, with regards to your question over how long these things can take to rectify, I can assure you that this issue has been in the top 50 list of enhancements and key developments for quite a time now but the engineering involved in getting this in place is complex and would take a lot of development time, I will however make sure it is kept live as I am as keen as you to get it in place.

All the best

10 years ago

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