I have recently started using QuickFile but am getting myself tied up in knots with the Tagging on the bank statement as I am ending up with duplicates all over the place. I have entered purchase transactions through the Receipt Hub and customers pay me either by BACS or cheques - these appear on the bank statement as a batch as I bank more than one at once. I don’t need to raise invoices for my business but creating them also seems to add duplication on the bank statement tagging. What am I doing wrong? I understand that the bank tagging creates an invoice or a receipt but how does this marry up with inputting cheque payments or scanning in receipts via the Receipt Hub?
The general rule is that if you have an automated feed for a bank account then you shouldn’t do things that create other transactions in that account directly. QuickFile often provides two or more ways to achieve the same thing, which is useful because different ways work better in different circumstances, but can be confusing until you’ve learnt which way to use when.
When you create a purchase via the receipt hub and tick the “paid” box, that creates a pre-tagged money out transaction in the selected bank account. And similarly, when you “log payment” on an invoice that creates a pre-tagged money in. So if the payment involves a bank account with an automated feed then you should not tick the paid box, and you should not log payment against the invoice directly. Instead, when the relevant transaction appears on your feed you tag it as payment to a supplier or from a customer, and assign it to the unpaid purchase or invoice there (rather than creating a new invoice).
Cheques are a bit different, here you need to treat your received-but-not-yet-banked cheques as if they were a bank account. Create a dummy “cheque holding account” bank account in QuickFile, and when one of your customers pays by cheque you can “log payment” into that cheque holding account. When you later take the cheques to the bank and the deposit shows up on your feed, you tag that as a bank transfer coming from the cheque account - it’s not payment from a customer at this stage, that happened at the point where they gave you the cheque.