how do I allocate a direct debit that is recurring, and higher than invoice
There’s several ways of doing it, but first of all why is the direct debit higher than the invoice amount?
its an energy supplier and we pay the same amount each month, but have different amounts each month for the bill
In that case I’d tag them as full or partial prepayments - payment to a supplier, pay down multiple…, assign as much as you can to existing purchases and leave the rest unallocated. Whenever you create a new purchase from a bill you log payment and “apply from credit” to use up any remaining prepayment.
This is where I find Quickfile to be a bit of a nightmare (also related to a feature request for more flexible handling of credit notes on supplier accounts I guess). I have somewhat ignored part of the process here as keeping track of supplier accounts like this can be a pain so I just tag from the bank and create an invoice as I go, but don’t bother uploading the invoices from the energy supplier. I have them all via email anyway if anyone ever wants to see them, no sense making things more difficult than they need to be for now.