Refund on prepayments

Hi, bit stick on how to sort this, but…

we have a direct debit for our electricity supply, which goes out as a prepayment. we have just had a large proportion of this returned as our electric bills have been a lot lower but i can’t seem to find out how to add this into quickfile. i can’t refund balance through any of the bills and if i try to tag the bank statement it tells me there are no corresponding invoices. this has happened a few times now and have ballsed it up so need to know how to sort it properly

regards

sean

Hi @scoobeski

With the refund, is that ever made up of multiple pre-payments, or just one?

its a lump sum so it’ll be multiple prepayments. we pay 100 a month and have a refund of 500

Ok, there are 2 methods you could use to do this.

  1. If you view a list of unallocated payments for that supplier (view the supplier, go to *View >> All payments and do an advanced search on “unallocated”), you can then go into the payments individually and refund the balance.
    However, this will produce a new transaction for each payment.

  2. The other option would be to create a dummy invoice for the amount of the refund (e.g. £500.00), log a payment from their credit and then credit the invoice itself. This would only create one bank transaction.

Hope that makes sense?

1 Like

that seems a pretty silly way of doing things. my accountants give me enough grief with out dummy invoices and added complications. is there really no other way of doing this?

Refunding the individual repayments would be the only other option (number 1 above). It would mean a little bit more work, but that would save you having a dummy invoice.

ok. well none of those options really match what is happening - botching the accounts to make them make fit seems to be the only option. makes me hate accounts even more lol.

cheers anyway

sean

If you have actually been invoiced for the higher amounts (e.g. estimated bills) and then given a credit when you gave them an accurate reading, then I’d create an ad-hoc credit note (i.e. a negative-value purchase invoice) for the credit date and that will create a transaction on your current account for the refund, you can then delete the duplicate one.

If your bills have been accurate but your payments too high, and now they’re just refunding the overpayments, then yes, you’ll just have to refund the individual pre-payments. If you want your QuickFile view of your current account to exactly match the bank’s view then you would need to use a dummy holding bank account as a buffer - refund the appropriate amount of the individual prepayments into there and then tag the money in to your current account as a transfer from the holding account to balance it back to zero.

It may actually be a mixture of the two, if you have a credit against estimated bills but there’s still an excess prepayment on top of that. In that case the holding account is the way to go, with the relevant bits of prepayments and credit notes refunded to there and a lump sum transfer to your current account for the overall refund.

The bigger you get the harder it is to match thing exactly as they happen, there are too many variables out there. I like to remind my accountant that whilst I am always grateful for advice as that is what he is there for its not acceptable to ‘tell me off’ when things are not exactly how he would like them. I’m not an accountant at the end of the day and unless I pay for a purpose built accounts package that revolves around how my business works and how he’d like to receive the year end information (which is obviously never going to be a cost effective thing) he’s just going to have to work with what we’ve got.

My mother and father have used same accountant for nearly 40 years and got a letter a few months back off them. Of course the head of the firm is virtually retired now so the new guy thought he’d let me mum know (who is also retired) that he wasn’t happy with the way they presented their accounts despite it being exactly how the old guy liked them. As it happens I’d already transferred everything to Quickfile so I can manage them for them away from the office, but if I’d got the letter I’d be looking for a different accountant (honestly its really condescending) and if I hear anything off him negative regarding Quickfile then we’re definitely off elsewhere.

This is just me ranting of course, but I’ve paid for sage at bigger companies and thats fine but you’ll still find it doesn’t cover everything. Dummy invoices and credit notes and finding a work around for non standard occurrences are going to be part of life for anyone whose not accounts trained and working on what is in effect free accounts packages. As long as you know whats happened and can explain it if you need to thats all that matters. Do what works for you.

You can create on new balance sheet account, call it On account Electric, once you record the actual bill on QF of say £80 and pay through DD of £100, tag 80 to bill an rest 20 to On account Electric, this way you can keep track of how much excess you are paying and any future refunds in bank can be tagged to On account Electric a/c. This will give correct P&l figure for Electricity and any other debtors in balance sheet.

Hope it helps

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