Spreading a Quarterly Payment over 3 months

Question asked by Iain Warren 9 years ago

HI there,

I pay my rent quarterly which messes up my PnL report as it comes up with 3 months of rent in one month and then nothing in the next two. I'm just wondering if it's possible to fix this so that the rent balances out over the 3 months?

thanks Iain

13 Replies

I think I actually messed up that post ever so slightly before Paul corrected me.

I now handle it as follows:

Post the initial rent bill to a debtor account called 'prepayments' Create a recurring journal for 3 months, debiting rent and crediting the prepayments account

End result is the prepayments account clearing down to zero and the rent showing in the P&L across the 3 months as required.

Sounds like they will keep you busy.

My accountant is fully aware of the issues we have, fortunately, we didn't owe anything to HMRC, at least there's a silver lining.

Pleasure.

Funnily enough, I took on a client not so long ago under similar circumstances. Not only were they caught with their hands in the till but they'd been under-declaring the VAT. Along I come to the rescue...and inside a month increase their VAT liability by over £30k! An interesting start to say the least...

Anyway, do speak to your accountant as the opening balances in Clear Books need to be 100% accurate or else when it comes to passing everything to them for your next set of accounts it won't make much sense whatsoever.

No, it probably wasn't set up correctly, the person who set up Clear Books for us was caught with their hands in the till, and there are lots of discrepancies unfortunately.

I will speak to my accountant, but thanks for your help. I've read alot of your posts when I've needed help with things, the community normally has the answer!

Cheers

Lucy

If you're a limited company then whoever's set Clear Books up hasn't done it properly as the excess balance needs to be shown as a payment on account. At present your opening balances in Clear Books won't match your actual accounts.

Do you use an accountant? If so, have a chat with them and they should be able to better explain what I mean. If you need a hand actually creating the payment on account just give me a nudge.

A limited company.

The customer would be happy with a spreadsheet to show how we have used the money up, if I can't do it on Clear Books, but thanks for your help.

Cheers

Lucy

A journal won't work i'm afraid.

Yup, you'll need to do a money in transaction which will indeed change your opening bank account balance.

Are you a sole trader or a limited company?

Hi Kevin,

That was quick!

This was done before I was doing the bookkeeping and before Clear Books, so it's currently not sat anywhere. I have to introduce the £10k and then drill down against it, just for the customer to see, I thought I could do it using a journal. If I do a sales invoice, I have to add a payment which was made years ago, this will affect the bank account, so not sure, is there another way?

Thanks Lucy

Hi Lucy

Presumably you've currently got the excess balance sitting as payment on account? You'd therefore just created your sales invoice as normal and then assign part of the excess receipt to the invoice. Rinse and repeat until the balance is used up.

Hi there,

Can someone help with my query.

We were paid £10k some years ago by one of our customers, and they were supposed to use it up while we did some work for them. This was before we were using Clear Books.

Now they want some work doing and we will be charging them £1,025 per month until it used up. I want to know if I can account for this on Clear Books, and how? It is more for our customer's benefit than ours, so they can see where their money has gone, can anyone advise?

Thanks

Lucy

thanks guys this has worked perfectly!

HI there,

Thanks for this - I just wondered however that rent wouldn't be considered "deferred income" as it's money going out. Should I create a new account code for these journal entries?

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