Import invoices

Accounting
1

Hello

I have very little experience with any type of bookkeeping. I am a software engineer :blush:
Our company is looking to start trading soon we just have some bits to finish.

We sell a service from our website
We use PayPal as the payment gateway
Clients need to have an account on our website.
Our website makes all invoices to our clients and checks PayPal for the funds.

The plan for now is to import new clients and invoices from our website using the import tool on QF, (The CSV files are made automatically from our website). We hope to use the API in the future.

Importing client data works just as I wanted (company name, account number, vat number. Don’t need address)

But when I import invoices, If the invoice has already been paid (99% of them will have been) it has a payment date set in the CSV file. Then on import QF makes a new transaction on the PayPal merchant account statement (as PayPal is set as the bank on the CSV file) QF then tags the payment to the invoice. But when QF does a PayPal feed refresh I get two transactions that are the same.

What’s the best way to do this?
Do I just remove the payment date from the CSV file, and then on import mark the flag as sent and wait for QF to sync the PayPal feed?
or am I way off?

Thank you for any help.
Mikey

2

Hello @FJ1

I think the first thing to ask here if whether you need the invoices on QuickFile or not? If your system is producing the invoices for you, then just simply recording the sales would be suffice as your other invoices would be the evidence.

In this scenario, you would simply record a total of daily or weekly sales on QuickFile, and even bulk up the bank entries rather than having individual payments. The following guide offers a bit more information on this: Accounting for daily takings.

Can I just check if there’s any reason you’re importing the transactions and have the feed enabled for PayPal? It would be easier to have just one or the other - you can even trigger the feed to run manually if you wish.

If you wanted to do it this way, there isn’t a way to prevent duplicate transactions unless you force the duplicate checker to be triggered. When the feed updates, we check for transactions that match:

  • Date
  • Description
  • Value

If all 3 match, we’ll skip the transaction and just import the others.

I hope that helps, but please don’t hesitate to let me know if I’ve missed something, or if you have further questions :slight_smile:

3

Hello

Thank you for the fast reply.

We would like to have the PayPal feed on QF because we can see all money coming in and out without needing to login to PayPal.

If I change our system to make a file named “paypal_sales_week_41.csv” with one line with all that weeks PayPal sale totals and setup a client named “online seals” then import it.

Will I still have problems?

4

The feed will still import the individual transactions as that’s what the feed is set up to do. It may be worth just spending a bit of a time experimenting with a few methods and seeing which works best.

Personally, I prefer the individual transactions for the daily bulk sales, and matching sales invoice as this leaves it looking tidier, but you can tag the individual transactions to 1 invoice if that’s a preferred way of working.