I was just having a play with your new “expand chart” function, and I noticed one of my supplier graphs showing a red blob for an “outstanding” purchase in October. The overall balance for the supplier is zero so there’s nothing actually outstanding, but when I drill down it seems that it’s getting confused by a credit note for £92.27
The credit note is dated 27th September but it was created by reducing the outstanding balance on an October invoice, and in the chart September shows a monthly balance of -92.27 and October shows 92.27 outstanding.
The credit note in question is a “retrospective discount” that we get at the end of the month from a supplier as a percentage of our total spend for that month. It isn’t a credit against a specific invoice per se, but would it make more sense within QuickFile to create the credit from a September purchase and hold the funds on account, then use those to part-pay the first purchase in October, rather than reduce the unpaid balance of the October purchase directly?
Sorry if this doesn’t make a lot of sense…
It looks like this is happening due to the balance reducing credit note pre-dating the invoice to which it has been applied. I will need to dig a bit deeper with this one as I wasn’t aware that a credit note could pre-date the invoice in this way.
Your nominal ledger posting and all respective reports will work on the basis of when the CN is applied, so there’s no problem there. The charts may however render a bit differently as they reference directly from the invoice data rather than ledger postings.
We pay this supplier 7 days in arrears so normally they apply the retrospective rebate by reducing the payment they take for the last invoice in a given month. But we missed a week in September (we didn’t order on 30th) so they ended up applying it to the first October payment instead and I took a shortcut of crediting the first October invoice directly rather than crediting the last September one and holding the funds on account, which would have been more strictly correct.
Normally if I get a credit from a supplier that says “this is a credit against invoice X” then I’m careful to record it that way in QuickFile, but these monthly rebate notes don’t reference any particular purchase.
It’s absolutely fine to do this, all your ledger postings will be correct and the credit will back date to the month you specify. It does however seem to cause some weirdness in the charts, although all other reports like TB, P&L BS etc are driven by nominal postings, the chart queries the invoices directly in a slightly different way.
We will have a look at the chart logic to see if there’s anyway we can better display these sorts of scenarios.