What is the intended or best method to refund a partially unapplied payment? We do NOT want to refund the invoices applied to the payment, but the remaining balance. We will write them a check but how to make the system show this partial refund and produce something we can provide to the client showing the refund?
Further context: we take lump payments up front and then apply multiple invoices against the lump sum payment. Need to refund the partially unapplied balance of a payment.
Via the documentation when I follow the steps to perform a refund, I am not able to enter a refund amount as the documentation says you should do. The only way I can seem to perform a refund action is to select an invoice.
Refunding a Payment
If you need to refund a payment, or part of a payment, go to the relevant payment in the Payments list, click on the Action column at the far right, and choose Refund Payment from the drop down menu. The Refund Payment dialog box will open. Enter the amount you wish to refund, and click Refund. If you want to send an email notifying the client of the refund, make sure to check ‘Send email to client’.
Hi,
Maybe you could create a credit for the amount?
Hi hillel,
We don’t know that this client will come back and are not wanting to carry any sort of credit or payment on our books as if they do return it would be many months. I tried to create an invoice for the remaining amount, not sending it and then refunding that…but it then marks the invoice unpaid which is a problem because there is nothing that actually needs to be paid.
Also seems that a payment can not be simply be edited so not sure what to do here. Creating a fake credit with then have to be shown as used and would cascade into inaccurate records.
Is there no process for handling refunds of payments not applied to an invoice?
Thank you
The only thing I can come up with is do what I mentioned above with a dummy invoice for the remaining amount, apply the remaining payment so the payment is “used up” and then refund the dummy invoice. This leaves an unpaid invoice but the payment seems to remain applied in full. I could then simply delete the dummy invoice? What repercussions will that leave and it will still reflect the correct income amount?
I don’t see others with the same questions having a real solution to refunds. In some cases a refund should not put an invoice in an unpaid state if the service or product was still delivered but refunded or partially refunded. And in my case I can’t see a clear path to refund an unused portion of a payment. There doesn’t seem to be any flexibility in refunds without directly tying it to an invoice. Is this correct?
I really need a solution so I can process a refund. Happy to submit a feature request but need something I can do now to reflect.
Not sure I have a better option to suggest
So is this round about way the only option and will it skew anything later? I need to be able to rely on this for tax reporting.
Seems like a pretty big oversight for an invoicing app not able to handle straight refunds. A refund could simply be a negative payment and shouldn’t have to be associated with an invoice or forcibly mark an invoice unpaid in other scenarios.
I don’t hope to run into this often but in our business we operate off advance payments so this will occur again.
Thank you
This is a real sticking point for me and I would be surprised if I am the first to run into this. Between the requirement to apply a payment to an invoice in order to refund it and then having said refunded invoice sit out there “unpaid” seems silly. I don’t want to have to create a fake invoice for a partially unapplied amount in order to refund it…and then be left with what looks like an unpaid invoice at the end of the year. Please advise on how to work through this scenario.
I believe we’re helping you with this on GitHub
I didn’t really get help I just asked the same question for visibility. David did respond but essentially said this is just how the system works. I still don’t understand why this would be as intended leaving what is essentially a fake unpaid invoice in the end. There is also no real document/receipt/etc the system produces that can be sent to the client.
Is there a specific change you’d like to see?
I guess just the ability to handle/process refunds without this odd work around of having create an invoice when the refund is unapplied or partially unapplied payment.
As a secondary, I don’t think invoices should simply revert to unpaid status when an actual invoice is refunded. There will be instances where a business may need to issue refund however the work was completed and the invoice should remain paid/complete for recording purposes. Currently, the only option leaves an unpaid invoice and as far as I can tell the advise is to simply delete it. This is not an acceptable solution as I mentioned, that work was still done and any business would still want to retain a record of that invoice.
Thanks
I’m not sure, to me it makes sense that refunding the payment for an invoice marks the invoice as unpaid. The app has worked this way for over 10 years now, I’m not aware of other people finding it an issue.
That is strange that you have never seen other mentions of that… While researching my main issue of not being able to refund unapplied payment, I ran into several threads where people are questioning why invoices get marked as unpaid. Some of those threads are even years old.
If you have ever run a business that provides services, you would understand that when you issue a refund you are not getting something back from the client. The invoice status should not change to unpaid because the service was still delivered. A more appropriate status would be simply refunded or the invoice recalculated to show the refunded amount but still remain in a paid state. -The invoice is still closed/complete even with a refund but the current handling in this scenario reopens the invoice to sit in limbo as unpaid.
The other facts still remains that there is currently no functionality to handle refunds for partially unapplied payments, aside from the workaround I came up with that involves creating a fake invoice and again leaves an unpaid invoice once refunded. The advice to simply delete to that invoice does not allow for good tracking and documentation of the incident.
Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.
I think the next step would be to create issue/feature requests on GitHub with the specific changes you’d like to see implemented. Unless maybe there’s already an issue for this?
I did submit a feature request. Thank you. Maybe I will revisit to make sure that I worded it as best as I can given the scenario.
@hillel Quick question…still trying to decide how to handle the refunded unpaid fake invoice I had to create for this…I DO want to keep it for records…If I archive it, will the “Outstanding” amount shown on the dashboard rebalance? Currently it shows an “Outstanding” balance of $300 which was the refunded amount. My hope is that I can just archive this invoice so we still have it for reference, but then also have the dashboard ignore the unpaid balance.
Or are we now going to be stuck with this amount “Outstanding” indefinitely?
By default archived records are included in reports/dashboard, deleted records are not.
Uhg, that’s another frustration. I’m not sure how to keep a record of this refund within invoice ninja then.
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