How best to record direct debits you pay out?

Hello. We have direct debits to eg our insurers and other suppliers, some annual some monthly. What is the best way to record these in QF? I’ve seen lots of information on incoming DD income but can’t find what I’m looking for about ones we pay out.

Thank you.

It’s just a transaction on the bank account so you’d tag it the same way you would any other transaction where you paid by card/cash/whatever.

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Thank you. Would you expect to raise a purchase invoice just for your own records to cover this sort of thing?

If it’s something like an energy supplier where you make regular monthly payments but get variable bills in arrears, then you should record each bill as a purchase as normal, and each regular DD payment as payment to a supplier (either a part payment towards an existing purchase, if you’ve been billed more than you’ve so far paid, or a payment on account if you’ve paid more than you’ve been billed). The same applies for anything where you’re reclaiming the VAT - you should record a purchase for each VAT invoice matching the invoice date, any a payment each time the DD goes out, to make sure you’re claiming VAT at the correct time.

If it’s something like insurance where VAT is not involved then it makes less difference whether you record one purchase for the total and several part payments for the instalments, or treat each instalment as a separate purchase.

I think @ian_roberts covered the how but to answer your question directly, I record everything with a purchase invoice of some description with the exception of bank fees. If you don’t raise a purchase invoice you are making it very difficult to follow the transactions, somewhat defeating the object of using Quickfile! Obviously if you aren’t VAT registered it is possible to not use purchase invoices but I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to.

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Thanks Lurch :slight_smile: I think exactly the same (we are VAT registered) but as I’m still gaining experience with doing accounts I wondered if I was adding in unnecessary steps. Purchase invoices are the way to go.

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Quite a few of my regular transactions and direct debits I have create the purchase invoices automatically via bank tagging which saves a few steps too. As with a lot of things in Quickfile there are several ways to do things, often just the correct method for you depends on how you do a few other things so there is not necessarily an incorrect way of doing things.

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