A bit of a mixed title, but hopefully a simple problem to solve.
We sell vouchers for a service, where the customer can spend it later. Think ‘helicopter rides’ (its’ not, but it’ll do for an example).
So someone buys a voucher for a helicopter ride for £100 in December as a Xmas gift. The recipient then comes to spend it at some point over the next 6 months. At that point it will cost us £50 to provide the service (fuel, pilot etc).
How can I manage the flow of customer credit and future (known) expenses such that we don’t overspend elsewhere? I’ve seen a few options, but none seem to quite fit…
One option would be to create an invoice for future purchases - but invoices can’t be forward-dated.
Another would be to use virtual bank accounts - however while this ring-fences the funds, it’s not clear how I can only ring-fence the future expenses but allow the profit to be available for spending?
Thanks for the reply. I had thought about using a virtual bank account to track this - but I would like to somehow flag up some funds as reserved as expenses, while the rest are available ‘profit’ for expenditure, which this wouldn’t allow -I can’t see a way to tag a portions of a transaction to multiple accounts?
Another option, since I know what the eventual expenses would be, is to allocate a portion of the funds as credit to a supplier, as if it has already been invoiced. But again, there is no way I can see to tag part of a transaction to a supplier? There also isn’t an obvious place to view all unallocated funds applied to all suppliers.
Thanks for this extra info. I’ve been looking at how to split the transfer of a transaction into 2 accounts, but it doesn’t seem possible when tagging, as ‘Transfer between accounts’ only allows a single transfer. So I guess I have to transfer the whole amount to the expenses account, then transfer the ‘profit’ out with a new transaction to the current account.
You could do a split transfer by using “something else not on the list” instead of “bank transfer”, then selecting the split option there and entering the nominal codes of the two bank accounts. But behind the scenes this creates a journal which then means if you make a mistake or later need to change anything about the transaction (change the date, pick a different account, etc.) then you have to do that by editing the journal, not the transaction.
