I’ve recently set up bank feeds and tagging but it doesn’t seem to work the way I hoped. What I do is I fill in an invoice with the details of the work I’ve done and send it to my client. When the client pays, Quickfile applies the tagging rule but issues a new invoice instead of finding the last sent but unpaid invoice from the client that matches the amount. I can manually tag the invoice as Quickfile finds the right one but this doesn’t save me time at all. Is there a way to automatically tag already sent invoices instead of issuing new ones?
Hi @almalaci,
The tagging rules will always create a new invoice rather than pick an old one. It is the way that the tagging rules have to work.
So if you have already created the invoice then you will need to manually tag the payment to it
Thanks for the quick reply Beth,
It’s a pity tagging works like that as I assume it would be normal for most businesses to have to send an invoice first to get paid. Would it be a good idea to request it as a feature to have an option in the tagging rule creation to look for an already created invoice and match it with a payment? Seeing as the system can already do the matching it would just need automation?
Hi @almalaci
This has come up before. The issue here would be knowing which invoice the payment is for exactly.
As an example, if someone has two invoices for £25 each for a different client, how should the system treat these - which invoice would the payment be for?
Thanks Mathew,
As long as the matching texts in the references are unique enough, it should be fairly easy to distinguish between payments.
This would work well in a scenario where businesses have regular clients because each regular client’s references tipically contain the same string of characters, usually name, bank details, etc, therefore can be used to identify the payment even when there are more payments of the same amount.
If they aren’t distinguishable still, Quickfile could fall back to manual tagging and if there is a persistent problem, the matching text can be set to be more specific or clients can come up with a more unique reference.
The only slight issue I see is if two invoices of the same amount are due from the same client. Which invoice the payment is for is irrelevant though, the payment can be issued to the earlier invoice.
Matching payments with already sent invoices could be an optional setting in the bank tagging rule creation.
For us businesses with regular clients often on a weekly payment schedule, it would be very helpful and could save a considerable amount of time. I myself would be very happy to test it.
Hi @almalaci,
I have moved this into a #feature post to monitor interest and see whether the dev team think it would be possible
Thank you both for your help and moving the issue to the features request.
However, I believe the auto-tagging mechanism of creating a new invoice is wrong.
As I understand, the process should be the following (as per the manual invoice handling in QuickFile):
- Invoice raised (DRAFT)
- Invoice sent to client (SENT)
- Invoice paid by client via bank transfer
- Bank feed received by QuickFile
- Payment matched with the right invoice based on statement text and the client set in the tagging rule
- The invoice is marked as PAID
Instead the current auto-tagging throws the process off at step 5 by raising a completely new invoice for the payment, ignoring the original invoice.
This doesn’t make sense (after all, how could a payment be made without an invoice in the first place?)
Tagging the payment manually works mostly straight away, the matching invoice can be found by QuickFile, so the problem is with the auto-tagging.
My suspicion is that QuickFile’s auto-tagging was designed mainly to manage Supplier Purchase Invoices, for which it should work very well as purchase invoice creation can take place after the bank transaction has already happened.
So if I’m right then this issue is not a matter of a feature request but instead changing the default behaviour of sales invoice auto-tagging from issuing a new invoice by default to look for sent and unpaid invoices instead.
With the current system, if auto-tagging is left unchecked, QuickFile will raise a duplicate of each invoice, leaving the original one unpaid.
Does my suggestion make sense or am I missing something here? If I’m wrong, a brief explanation of why that is would be very welcome.
Many Thanks
I’m going to answer this for myself here. My accountant informed me of my suspicion: Companies always check invoice payments manually and do not use auto-tagging for that. I thought that might be the case seeing as this issue hasn’t seriously come up before.
However much logical auto-tagging would be, it’s not the way incoming payments are dealt with.
Apologies for calling QuickFile’s auto-tagging process, therefore common accounting practice wrong. I’ll be checking my incoming payments manually like everyone else.
Regards,
Laszlo Almasi
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