Cash transactions: Zero income transaction gets recorded as an expense

Question asked by Tanguy Blachere 20 hours ago

We have a few customers always paying cash, we track these incomes with a weekly "Cash sales week X" transaction in a dedicated "cash register" cash account.

Whenever there was no cash sales a given week, we like to still enter a transaction to show that "week X" has not been forgotten. The system lets us enter an "income" as zero value.

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Once confirmed, it says the transaction is recorded in the "income list":

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However, the transaction is nowhere to be found in the income list, but instead gets recorded as an "expense", with a [PAY] type of record.

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(And in the "cash register" account ledger, the transaction does not appear as a 0.00 deposit but as a 0.00 withdrawal).

I know that it will not be a problem in terms of overall numbers or tax implications, but it makes it impossible to have a list of weekly transactions all appearing in the same income list or report.

Since I really want a list including every week, my workaround so far is to input a notional non-zero amount (£1 or £5) in the transaction record (but then to keep the accounts clean I have to deposit the same amount of cash from my own pocket to the cash register, and HMRC are going to take their cut on that).

Is there a cleaner/more proper way to achieve zero value income cash transaction recorded as a [REC] instead of a [PAY] ?

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4 Replies

Hi Tanguy,

No problem, I will pass this feedback onto our Product team for future review. In the meantime, the best alternative is to continue using the zero-value invoice method. To make these entries easier to find, you might want to create a separate contact specifically named for your zero cash invoices. This will allow you to quickly review the income list and apply a contact filter for that specific contact to track your entries weekly.

Tommy

Best answer
18 hours ago

Hi Tanguy,

Thank you for flagging this up. I have escalated this internally and we are likely to restrict raising 0 value income.

As a workaround, you can use the Create Invoice button and input a 0 value so this shows in the income list.

Tommy

20 hours ago

Thanks for the quick feedback.

I tried the create invoice method and it works to have it appear properly in the income list.

With this method, the zero-value invoice is automatically marked as PAID so I cannot allocate a cash register transaction to it, so nothing appear in the cash register statement.

In terms of pure accounting that is fine, but for bookkeeping it doesn't really help. Our income list can have up to 100 lines per week so the "cash sales week X" lines are buried in noise in the income list, so much that I may not notice if I miss one particular week.

The cash register account statement, with just one entry per week (plus a few odd transactions) allows me to have a more condensed view of all the cash operations (and to immediately spot if one week has been missing).

I have read several older questions about zero-value transactions and invoices before posting this one. I understand from many answers that zero-value transactions are a bit of a challenge/headache for the developers. I appreciate that, but I would still plead them to try to think if there is a safe way to implement it instead of banning it outright.

(after all, in the days of manual paper accounting, a zero value line in a ledger was never really a problem, why should it be one for a computer gazillion times more efficient at counting than humans...)

19 hours ago

Hi Tanguy,

No problem, I will pass this feedback onto our Product team for future review. In the meantime, the best alternative is to continue using the zero-value invoice method. To make these entries easier to find, you might want to create a separate contact specifically named for your zero cash invoices. This will allow you to quickly review the income list and apply a contact filter for that specific contact to track your entries weekly.

Tommy

Best answer
18 hours ago

Thanks Tommy

yes I noticed the income list can be filtered by contact, So I'll probably use this method (zero invoices to cash-customer, sortable in income list for reporting & reviews) for the time being.

I'll still be happy to put everything in the cash account statement if the possibility materialise someday :-)

Have a great day.

16 hours ago

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