Spreading a Quarterly Payment over 3 months

Hi Iain,

It sounds like this would need to be created as deferred income which Kevin best describes in the post below - however if you have any further queries about it just let me know.

https://secure.clearbooks.co.uk/community/questions/13359/deferred-income

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?

thanks guys this has worked perfectly!

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

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 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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.