Hello,
In August last year I refunded a customer £640 by bank transfer. At the end of our financial year the customers account is showing positive 310, however I know that the customer actually owes us 330.
This is because the the customer’s QFaccount has not been reduced by the 640. I have tried both ways of entering this …tagging the bank entry as a customer refund or entering a credit note which creates a bank entry, but neither way reduces the customers account by 640. Sometimes the credit note has been linked to a an invoice in that year and sometimes it hasn’t, but neither way reduces the customers balance. I have deleted all reference to the -640 and the customers account balance shows +310 (which would be correct but for the refund) but adding a credit note does not reduce this balance. I am very worried that if I didn’t keep separate record, I would end up £640 out of pocket if I relied on the QF customer’s account to be correct! Is this an issue with the program, or is there something else that I need to do?
Many thanks
Although we can’t help directly with individual bookkeeping queries, we’ll try and offer some guidance to try and help you.
Can you give us a bit of detail on this? For example, I’m assuming you’ve issued an invoice - was any of it paid? From the invoice, I’m assuming you then issued a refund (of £640), which has gone direct to the client?
Hi Mathew,
Thanks for getting back to me, I have already spent a couple hours going through this and cannot get to the bottom of it.
Basically the customer is a tenant. There is a re-occurring invoice on his account for £340 monthly. I keep separate rent record spread sheet that I cross reference everything against. At the begining of the financial year ( 1/4/2019) he was 240 in credit. I have undone all this years transactions on QF and can see that QF was correct at this time - showing a prepayment balance of 240.
By August 2019 the tenant was 640 in advance. We agreed with him to refund the money to him and did so by bank transfer.
Over the 12 month period the tenant has made 12 payments into our account. I have tagged all these to his account, and then paid each invoice from the prepaid amount in his account. If I totally ignore the refund, the year end shows +310 which would have been correct if we had not made a refund. But because we refunded 640, the tenant actually owes us 330 at the year end. ( He missed a payment in December, but also paid £10 too much in March 2020)
So I have tried to tag the bank entry for the refund. (To do this I deleted April’s invoice, and added the amount to May’s invoice ie May now reads £680 to allow the credit note to be applied ) This creates a credit note in the account, and May’s invoice shows as partly credited. But the customers account still shows a prepayment of 310, rather than a deficit of 330.
I have also tried deleting the bank transaction, and starting the credit note from scratch. This still produces the same result. ( sometimes it has not made me allocate the credit note to an invoice, but this also had the same result.)
Does the system “ignore” credit notes because it assumes that customer has paid less on the invoice rather than paid the full amount which has been physically refunded?
Your help is really appreciated,
thank you,
Michelle
If your tenant has paid you more than you’ve invoiced them, and all their payments have been tagged as “payment from a customer” then presumably there are still one or more of the payments that show as unallocated (making up the prepayment balance on the client account). From the client’s summary page, do “view…” -> “all payments” -> “advanced search” and search for payments of type “unallocated”.
Now for each of these payments (there may only be one), you can click through to the payment detail screen and you’ll see an option at the top to “refund balance”. When you do that it’ll create a pre-tagged refund transaction on the selected bank account, when you’ve done all the refunds you can delete the untagged duplicate transaction and everything should balance up.
Hi Ian,
Thanks so much, that sorted the problem 
(Only the final 310 was unallocated because he made 12 payments and there were 12 invoices, but undoing all the payments back to August got me to the 640 unallocated, which I dealt with how you have described. All correct now correct
Although that solves my problem, I am worried that QF does not cover this situation adequately. . When I originally tried to tag the refund entry on the back feed, one of the options was “customer refund” which then created the credit note, that did not reduce the customers overall balance. Surely when this option is selected it should bring up the payment page and allow you to do a refund that does reduce the balance? I can’t think of any situation where a physical refund has gone through the bank, but you don’t not want it to reduce the customers account balance, and so the process on QF is misleading and erroneous. What do you think? Is this something that the developers ought to be looking at?
Anyway, thanks again I would never have got it sorted without your help,
Michelle
Yeah, refunding unused credit is a bit clunky in QuickFile, the “customer refund” tagging option is for crediting and immediately refunding an invoice, not refunding a balance held on account. Really, the issue is that QuickFile doesn’t really have the concept of a “customer’s account balance” in the same way other book-keeping tools do, there’s just payments that have been allocated to an invoice and payments that haven’t been. It’s possible for a customer to have both unpaid invoices and unallocated pre-payments at the same time, you have to explicitly “apply from credit” to apply the pre-payments to the outstanding invoices.
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