Deleting Sent invoices?

[madbilly]

Hi Quickfile team!

Sometimes when I tag a bank transaction as a payment a new invoice is created rather than assigning the payment to an existing invoice… I’ve not worked out why yet, but it happens. Anyway, these new invoices are ones I don’t want, but they are marked as Sent. If I delete them will all the corresponding links also be deleted, e.g. the amount won’t be tracked as owed by the customer anymore?

Or, is there some way to change from Sent to Draft and then delete them?

Cheers

[ian_roberts]

When you tag as payment from a customer it will offer you a list of invoices at the same value as the payment, if you select one of those it will assign the payment to the existing invoice. If the payment amount does not match the full total of a single unpaid invoice then you need to use the “pay down multiple invoices” option, which despite the name will work for partial payments towards a single invoice as well as one payment across multiple invoices.

The exception is if you’re using multi currency mode - bank tagging will only offer you invoices that are in the same currency as the bank account.

If you want to create a new invoice for the payment then you have to explicitly choose to do so with the relevant button.

[madbilly]

Hello Ian,
Thanks for explaining how to avoid the problem in the first place. But what about the invoices I’ve created by mistake which are marked as Sent? Could there be any issues caused if I just delete them?
Cheers

[ian_roberts]

Am I correct that this was (roughly) the sequence of events?

1. You originally created an invoice A and sent it to your customer
2. Your customer made a payment, which you tagged as such
3. But as part of that tagging you created a new invoice B instead of assigning the payment to A

In that case invoice A (the original one) would now be showing as “sent”, and invoice B (the new one) as “paid” - B skips the “sent” stage because it was already paid at the moment it was created. Both of these invoices will contribute to your P&L turnover, so you’re effectively showing twice as much income as you should be.

Question - has your customer seen a copy of invoice B? Did you send them a payment confirmation when you tagged the payment in QuickFile?

If the customer has not yet seen invoice B then you should be able to:

• go to the tagged bank transaction, click on the green “tagged” button, then follow the link in the popup that says “this payment …”
• the link takes you to the payment record page, in the detail section in the middle there should be a line saying that this payment has been assigned to invoice B
• click the red button on that line to “detach” the payment from the invoice. This will revert B to “unpaid” and leave the payment as a “prepayment” on the customer account, not assigned to any particular invoice
• navigate to invoice A, “log payment”, and tick the “apply from credit” option.

With all these steps complete you should now have invoice A showing as “paid” and B showing as “sent”, and it is now safe to delete invoice B.

If the customer has seen invoice B then rather than just deleting it you should probably make a credit note to cancel the unpaid invoice A, leaving B alone as paid. This way both you and the customer have the same record of A being created, then B being created and paid, then A being cancelled.

[madbilly]

Hi Ian,

Yes that’s roughly what happened. Thank you for the explanation and clarification about consequences of deleting a Sent invoice. As far as I know, the client has not seen the invoice and I don’t send payment confirmations, at least I don’t recall setting up Quickfile to do that. I think it’s safe to delete these invoices and I’ll try and pay more attention in future when tagging bank transactions!

Cheers