The Background
A colleague writes a cheque to a supplier that drops off goods. The supplier invoice is loaded onto Quick File and is shown as unpaid. My other colleague sees that this supplier is owed money in the aging report so makes a payment to the supplier that matched the invoice value.
The Issue
I do not mark the supplier invoice as PAID (even though it has been via cheque) because if I mark it as PAID the bank tagging feature appears to mark the supplier as having received the amount twice.
Question
I want to mark the supplier invoice as paid, so that my other colleague does not pay it (again) but I still want the bank tagging to work correctly and not have QF mark the supplier as having been paid twice.
Am I not understanding something here or how does the system cope with this scenario. Answers about controlling my staff will be politely ignored
It depends what you mean by “work correctly”. When you manually mark the invoice as paid (at the point you wrote the cheque) that will create a money out transaction on the bank account. When the cheque is cashed you’ll get a transaction on your bank feed for the same amount which you can safely delete instead of tagging it.
The bank balance will be out of sync between the time you wrote the cheque and the time it was cashed, but from a management point of view you probably want it that way round so you’re working on the basis of the cheque money not being available to spend on anything else in the meantime.
The other thing you can do is create a “cheque holdings account”. This is just a type of bank account used to track presented but uncleared cheques.
So effectively as soon as you send the cheque you can mark the invoice as paid, but instead of paying it from the current account you would pay it from the cheque holdings account. Now that cheque holdings account is overdrawn, when the cheque payment finally appears on your current account you then just tag it as a transfer to the cheque holdings account, netting off the balance.
The cheque holdings account works for both cheques paid and cheques received, it allows you to mark any invoice as paid immediately and to track any uncleared cheques later down the line.
