Refund from a supplier - auto-create Credit Note?

Hello,

I have just spent quite a while trying to figure out how to handle a refund from my electricity supplier that was a larger amount than any of my invoices/pre-payments, because when I clicked on the ‘Refund from supplier’ option in Bank tagging, it couldn’t find any invoices to refund that were less than the amount of the refund.

(I had up to now been creating an invoice for each payment to the electricity supplier, rather than treating these direct debit payments as the pre-payments that they actually are, but that’s a separate issue for me to sort out I think)

After lots of reading about workarounds, I eventually just tried creating a credit note (well, a negative amount purchase) for the refund amount (which created a duplicate bank transaction) and deleting the imported bank transaction. I’m still not sure if this is the correct thing to have done, but it seems to have adjusted the expenses and bank totals by the correct amounts, so for now it seems ok.

My question is, if this is indeed an appropriate way to handle a bank refund that is associated with more than one invoice, why can’t the bank tagging tool automatically create a credit note/negative purchase invoice from there (in the same way that you create a positive amount purchase invoice), rather than having to manually create it in the supplier account and then delete a pre-existing transaction?

Hi @Claire_F,

At the moment, the way you have done it is the best way at the moment however we are working on adapting the credit notes to make them easier/more user friendly.

I have sent you a PM please look out for the icon

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It’s the way credit notes work. Hopefully this can be changed to make more sense one day.

i dread credit notes from suppliers. they are a nightmare to deal with on here, especially when the amounts are awkward. i’ve literally spent hours going round in circles adding and deleting entries.

You can now create a credit note for a supplier and hold the balance on the supplier account - you can then use this balance to pay invoices off or refund the balance to your bank account

You still have to select an invoice to assign the credit note to though so it’s still a pain. The QF reference numbers are useless in this scenario. Credit notes don’t need to be assigned to a purchase invoice, just treat the account as a transactional account. Whatever it is the purchase invoice does just make the credit note do the opposite, i.e. add the credit note to the account and reduce the balance.

To add to the above, I have just added another credit note but I can’t select the invoice to credit it against as it only lists paid up invoices to credit to. If I have a credit account with a supplier I’m going to be adding credit notes for items that aren’t paid yet. Can’t really see what you’ve actually done that makes any difference or improves anything here. Credit note handling still doesn’t work.

After adding other credit notes to existing paid up invoices I’m in more of a state than I was originally. I have mentioned before (Dashboard 'Total You Owe' (QF staff keep incorrectly recategorising this as a support topic but it is a bug as I’ll explain below)) that the totals shown on the dashboard and on the invoice management page differ but also the supplier ‘account at a glance’ figure shows something else. This makes it difficult to pay suppliers at the end of each month, which figures do we use to pay the supplier from? You’d expect the “Total you Owe” to be the total you owe, not just some arbitrary figure derived from some random selection of invoices and credit notes.

To summarise, credit notes/credit accounts are still a mess and a total nightmare to deal with.