I have numerous clients how place regular orders with us and whom find it easier to handle one monthly invoice showing all the orders they have place instead of multiple individual invoices. Statements don’t seem to be helpful to them, so I keep a draft invoice and add each order to it as required (which I find a pain as it limits automation).
In a dream scenario it would be great to select all the individual invoices issued to a client using a tick a box next to the invoices I want to summarise and then mash them into one invoice that takes the line entries from each.
It seems to me that might be a big ask, but the other thing that I find irritating is not being able to see turnover in real time until the invoices are posted. I understand that until such time as they are posted it has no bearing on the accounts, but it would be really helpful to have a total of Draft Invoices available on the Dashboard as a separate informational item (perhaps under the “Balance at a Glance” section).
What you’re describing is exactly what a statement is, and it’s a pretty standard way of doing things. The way you do it you will end up with duplicate invoices for this client every month so what do you do with the unpaid ones?
I would be inclined to educate your client, or send copies of the invoices with the statement. I don’t think duplicating invoices would be a viable feature request.
I would say DRAFT invoices should in no way affect the financials and definitely shouldn’t appear on the P&L or debtor control accounts. Regarding the merging of multiple DRAFT invoices into a single multi-line invoice, this is probably something that you’d need to develop yourself via the API.
You can get a count and total of DRAFT invoices from within the advanced search area on the main invoice list:
Bear with me because I am by no means an accounts whizz!
So, would it be normal to issue a statement once a month in addition to the individual invoices?
Do you have any examples of best practice that you can point me to in relation to this process?
I’m not sure why you think that I end up with duplicate invoices each month. The way I do it is to have the draft invoice and edit/add items as needed and only post it at the end of the month. If you mean what would I do in my dream scenario of mashing the invoices together then I guess I would hope for it to delete the unwanted individual invoices and be left with one cumulative invoice.
@Glenn thanks for pointing out a way of getting the total of drafts. I agree that it shouldn’t affect the P&L, I was just hoping for an informational widget on the dashboard - that’s all. Whilst it may well be possible to use the API to sort this out, a) I don’t really have time to learn how to get it to do this and b) perhaps I should tell my clients to use standard accounting practices
You can raise your invoices throughout the month and at the end of the month a statement will be issued showing your client any outstanding invoices with a single balance to pay. You can also include any recent payments and credit notes on the statement.
Sending invoices plus a periodic statement of account is standard practice and used by many businesses with customer credit accounts.
This is just the process that I have adopted. Manually creating a composite invoice from diverse transactions is error prone and time consuming but I had a lot of grief from customers when I used QF to generate individual (accurate) invoices instead. I don’t know if they are really happy with statements but at least they have stopped complaining.
Well, that is an opinion on the matter I suppose. Pretty much all my suppliers tell me I can only have an invoice for each purchase throughout the month and they then tell me I can get a statement at the end of the month. These suppliers of mine that are telling me and thousands of other customers what to do are not particularly bothered what I want them to do.
