What is the best way to convey a client’s actual balance? We deal in prepayment or “credit” for many of our clients which I now understand needs to handled as regular payments or overpayment on invoices.
I am having a hard time figuring out a way to convey the remaining balance. I don’t really want to email reports because a spreadsheet is not ideal for mobile use. A PDF generated report (tried client statement but no luck) or a line on the invoice. Some clients do not care about an invoice but if that is the way I have to keep them updated on their balance that would be fine.
Hi,
One option would be to send a client statement which includes credits and payments.
I tried this yesterday. Unfortunately the statement only shows invoice based data. So it will show payments based on invoices but no information on the lump sum payment that these invoices are paid from.
This is where I feel that credits should have the option to have a payment behind them. Essentially credit that clients pay for. Then I could use all the credit features already in place.
I do have the setting turned on that automatically applies any balance towards a new invoice for a client that has a positive balance. That results in an invoice showing the product for $0 which is a little weird, I wish it would still show the normal cost but $0 in the total but was still missing is some kind of balance.
Outside of using the credit functionality of invoice ninja I can see a good way to handle regular lump sum payments in advance which we require for a large part of our business.
Any other suggestions? I did submit a github feature request about having the option to link or back credit with a payment. I think if that where possible, this would be more workable.
Thank you
Sorry, not that I’m aware of
Bummer, I wonder how other folks are handling actual paid credit with this application? The only other thing I can think of to handle this is to create both a payment and a credit when a client pays in advance. The payment would just be there to account for the money received from the client and not be applied to any invoices. The matching credit would then be used towards future invoices and benefit from how the system handles and displays credits.
Can you think of any adverse affects of doing this? Since I now know that the value of a credit is not accounted for as a payment…this should both serve to log the incoming payment as well as provide a method to distribute and track it as a credit. It’s not ideal and maybe a feature could added to allow this to happen automatically with an option but I need to figure out the best way to make this work.
@david I will include some of this in my feature request as notes.
Have you considered just creating the payment and not the credit?
Yes, that is what I worked on yesterday while chatting with you on discord. In my test instance I went one by one and deleted each credit (that was paid for by a client) and created payments for each. This does make my dashboard numbers accurate (RE other issue) but then I lose the system’s ability to handle these payments as if they were credits. So like the question I am asking in this topic…I can’t use the statement report as a means to inform clients of their current/remaining balance…because there is no credit to show. The “credits” tab also has some other neat features like being able to easily see what is remaining as well as when clicking on a credit you can see each time an amount was applied. -So there are several nice “credit” based functions that are no longer usable when simply entering a lump payment.
Hence my question about making two entries for the same amount, one being a credit and one being a payment and then using the credit going forward because of the added functionality that comes with credits.
Sorry if I am not using the correct terms, not an accountant but IT background… basically I want/need the option to record some lump payments as payments but then treat that payment as a credit for distribution and tracking across multiple future invoices.
We provide lessons as part of our business and we often receive (and encourage) clients to pay for several in advance. I like to then be able to keep the client informed via some automated process/report via email each week with a quick summary of their balance. The client statement report is able to do this…but only when credits are being used.
Some of my customers pay in advance some work too. I record it as a payment. I explain to my customers that they can see it on their portal : they can see their payments and see what part of each payment has been used alreday, for which invoice it’s been used, and how much remains of it. You can send a payment’s details by email to inform your customer.
I don’t use the client the portal at this time but sounds like it would provide all information needed. I’ve played around with payments but haven’t found a way to create an automated process to send balances via email. I’m also trying to see if it could just be displayed on an invoice. It’s just kind of a bummer that you can handle prepayments the same as credits in the system.
I will keep digging and see what I can make work for our situation. I am still hoping for confirmation from a developer on how I think it will be best to fix my past payments that were entered as credits… I think I have already described the only way and it appeared to work in my test instance, but just hoping for some reassurance.
Thanks for the reply
My customers really like the portal, it’s very informative, and available any time.
I would use portal except we are rural (horse farm) and our Internet is cellular. I can get around cgnat with cloudflare tunnels but I’m not sure I want to push my luck with the provider. Fiber is getting ever close and I might consider it at some point and enable the portal.
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