Hi,
I’m a wedding photographer and often take booking fees 12-18 months in advance, and outstanding balance payments 4 weeks before the wedding date. I only earn the fee on the date of the wedding, once services are provided.
I have found information regarding part payment/booking fees (allocated payments assigned to clients) which seems to work most of the time. However, a recent wedding fell on 9th April 2016, invoice was raised early march and and outstanding balance was received.
However when I run my reports, the income is showing within the 2015-16 financial year, rather than 2016-17.
Can you advise on the correct procedure to ensure the income falls within the right financial year?
Income on the Profit and Loss report is calculated from the invoice date and by the invoice amount - regardless of when payment was received (known as accrual accounting).
To make the invoice from March come into effect in April, the easiest way would be to change the invoice date (which should be the ‘supply date’, in your case the date of the wedding).
Hope that helps?
On paper yes, however it then means the payment date can’t be set before the invoice date. Any way around this?
I guess it happens on so few occasions that it would only be necessary to do this on affected transactions?
You should be able to do this - there’s 2 main ways it can be done:
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Go into the invoice, and click ‘Log Payment’. Enter the amount and date, and save:
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Tagging from the bank is possible, but a bit different than usual. Because the final payment would be a partial payment (due to the deposit), you would need to look up invoices by click. Click ‘Tag Me!’ and select ‘Payment from a client’, as usual. The system will then look for invoices around the date of the transaction, but will fail to produce any results (due to the deposit):
Then enter your client:
This will allow you to select what invoices you wish to mark as paid:
Job done! 
Hope that helps!
Thanks, that goes some way to explaining. What about on creation of an invoice though, which would likely be sent around 6 weeks before the wedding? Sorry if I’m missing something here!
I’d just journal it - create a new nominal code on your chart of accounts for “prepaid income” in the assets and liabilities section, then create two mirror-image journals: on the last day of 2015-16 it would be credit prepaid income and debit general sales, then vice-versa on the first day of 2016-17.
The first journal takes the amounts out of your profit and loss for 2015-16 and leaves them as a liability on your balance sheet instead, the second moves the amount back from your balance sheet into the 2016-17 P&L.
Note that while QuickFile doesn’t let you create future-dated invoices or bank transactions, I’ve found that it does allow future-dated journals, so you can create both journals at the same time as you raise the invoice.