The solutions provided in the above mentioned article are incredibly time consuming, and don’t really reflect reality when you frequently order via marketplaces, such as Amazon or eBay.
I have four suppliers fulfilling one order placed via Amazon; for each of the orders exist individual invoices in Quickfile. Since it all went through Amazon, I have one payment on my bank account transaction list.
Manually splitting transactions is just too time consuming with either method described in the aforementioned post.
Rather, I need/want to select the four invoices in the bank tagging process that comprise the one convoluted payment to Amazon. Automation suggestion: Have Quickfile suggest a combination of untagged invoices that add up exactly to the amount that is going to be tagged. If more than one solution exist, revert to user selecting the invoices to be tagged together against the bank transaction.
There’s a technical reason that you wouldn’t be able to attach one payment to multiple invoices from numerous clients or suppliers, and the holding account is the best way to deal with this.
How are you tagging them at the moment? The best way to do this is probably to use the “Mark as paid” option at the foot of the purchase invoice, and pay it from the holding account as you create it. Or if you do it from the receipt hub, use the paid option there.
That way, you only have to tag the actual money out transaction on your current account statement as a transfer to the holding account.
I think this may become a little bit complex or heavy on the system as the number of unpaid invoices grow, but you’re welcome to post this as a feature request, and we’ll happily investigate further if there’s enough interest from the community.
I’ve back then in my days as a contracted Software Engineer implemented exactly that feature in a bespoke solution for a Swiss private bank. Clever algorithms quickly reduce the number of unpaid/untagged invoices to be considered.
At the moment I do exactly as you suggested, as the frequency of these situations are low. However, as the business behind that scenario is expected to grow, and more people will have to be empowered to make purchases on behalf of our organisation (a not for profit run by volunteers) I expect these situations to increase in frequency.
The alternative would be to ask those who make purchases to split purchases by supplier - but that would be detrimental to the way how platforms such as Amazon etc. are operating - or limiting (again) the number of people who are allowed to make purchases. Or ask people to use their own debit cards and run expense claims.
Any alternative are raising the effort to manual procedures.
There’s no simple alternative to the way it’s currently done, payments are always keyed to single suppliers or clients and this is very much baked into the system and is in fact necessary for other reporting aspects to work correctly in QuickFile.
When you have an intermediary like Amazon, PayPal, Stripe etc then they are holding funds on your behalf, this is something that would feature on your balance sheet, even if it were only for a day or two. Having this activity hived off into another account allows for that sort of reporting.
You may pay Amazon on 12th July, but the supplier may not issue an invoice until the 15th therefore having the funds on a holding account in this way allows you to reconcile your bank account and correctly shows those funds as an asset on your balance sheet until they are joined to an invoice.
