Hi @Wordcatcher
Apologies for the delayed response.
I think the scenario you have here would be similar to that of an estate agent managing rental properties for example (where they collect rent from tenants, taking their fee and paying out the rest to the landlord).
For the publishing side of things, where you sell the books, you would naturally have the invoice for the sale itself. Whether you issue these individually or bulk these together (e.g. having a client saved as “Web Sales” rather than “Mr Jones”) would depend on your set up and how you operate. If it’s sales through a website for example, I would opt for the bulk sales option as your web site probably issues it’s own invoices as a record.
So in this case you would just have:
- Sales invoice(s) for the general sales
- Payment for this invoice, tagged in your bank account (or merchant account, again depending on your setup)
- Purchase invoice to the author
- Payment tagged to the invoice
The balance between the 2 being your profit, like a normal sale.
The difficulty comes when the supplier becomes your client. You could use the contra account if you’re not actually taking any money from them, or paying them the net of what you owe/they owe. There’s no direct way to have the client and supplier as the same entity in QuickFile, but there are some feature requests you may wish to add your vote to:
Hope that helps, but please let us know if you have any further questions