Link expenses to existing payments instead of creating another invoice

Self-Hosted | v5
1

Hello

I really love this software! I am still learning it and I seem to have run into an issue.
I can only invoice an expense to a customer, but I can’t link the expense to an existing invoice.

My workflow is this:

  1. Create and send quote, quote is marked as “sent”
  2. After accepted, Convert quote to invoice then send invoice and invoice is marked as “sent”
  3. Customer pays > create manual deposit transaction > Link payment to invoice
    **The transaction now shows as matched, and the invoice shows as paid
  4. Then I create a manual expense, linking it to the vendor and the customer
    **(this will obviously be for a lower amount than the one invoiced to make profit, for example R500 as expense and R750 as invoice, profit is R250), the options “should be invoiced to customer” and “marked as paid to vendor” isn’t selected, and the expense now shows as “Logged”
  5. Create manual withdraw transaction for the cost of the product (e.g. R500) > link to expense created in step 4.
  6. Open the expense created in step 4 and check “mark as paid to vendor”
    ** The expense now says “paid” and I get an option to invoice expense. But after clicking “invoice expense”, it will open a window to create a new invoice with the total amount of the expense. There is no button that says link to invoice from step 2 that was created previously.

Doing that will result in a double invoice to the customer when they have already paid for the item.

Is there something I am missing or doing wrong?

2

Again, I am new but I noticed @david and @hillel knows whats cracking here :slight_smile:

I hope one of you guys will be able to help me!

3

Hi,

I think the challenge is the app expects the expense to be entered first and added to the invoice before the invoice is sent to your client.

Note: you can add an expense to an invoice by clicking the + icon in the lower right corner of the edit invoice screen.

4

Hi,

Yes you are correct! It does work that way, however I would have to add all of the line items from the quote onto the invoice manually.
Is there also somewhere that shows net profit from expenses and invoices ?

5

There is a ‘Profit and Loss’ report you can use.

6

Yep that works great !

Now I just need to figure out how to turn a quote into an invoice, link it to a payment from customer and expense from me

Any thoughts?

7

One option may be to replace the line items with the expenses in the invoice.

8

okay so after much playing around i figured it out.

you have to add the expense to the invoice before you allocate a payment to it.

steps:

  1. create quote and send to customer.
  2. once customer approves, convert quote to invoice
  3. you can now mark invoice as sent
  4. create expense, allocate to vender and allocate to customer and amount will be cost of sales. you can mark it as “should be invoiced” and save expense
    **DO NOT CREATE THIS EXPENSE FROM THE TRANSACTIONS SECTION BECAUSE IT WON’T ALLOW YOU TO ALLOCATE TO CUSTOMER
  5. after saving expense, you can now click “allocate to invoice” and the invoice that was created in step 2 will show up in your list, so click on that invoice. it will then add your expense to the invoice. don’t worry about the total invoice amount for now, and click on save.
    **YOU MUST CLICK ON SAVE FOR THIS TO WORK
  6. after saving the invoice, delete the line item that was added - this is the expense amount (cost of sales), save the invoice now again.
    **IF YOU GO TO YOUR EXPENSE SECTION, IT WILL SHOW THE EXPENSE AS INVOICED
  7. create withdraw and deposit transactions - withdraw would be your cost of sales and deposit will be for the invoice amount from above. both transactions must say unmatched
  8. now you can click on the withdraw transaction and the window will open to either create a new expense or link expense, you will click on link expense and it would see a list with the invoice to that customer that would be marked already as invoiced. click on the appropriate one and then click link expense.
    **STEP 9 MUST BE THE LAST STEP YOU DO
  9. click on the deposit transaction, on the window click create payment and it would list the customers with open invoices, click on the one you created in step 2 and then click create payment
  10. the invoice will now be marked as paid.
    **IF YOU RUN THE PROFIT AND EXPENSE REPORT FOR THAT CUSTOMER, IT WILL SHOW YOU THE TOTAL INVOICES (SALES) AND TOTAL EXPENSES (COST OF SALES) FOR THAT CUSTOMER AND YOUR PROFIT FROM THAT CUSTOMER.

I hope this helps someone along the line…

1 Like
9

Glad you found a solution!

I’m curious why the transactions are needed? They’re designed to be imported from a bank account, we generally don’t expect them to be created manually (although it is supported).

10

I actually didnt know that we can import bank transactions!

does that happen automatically once linked to a bank or manual import is required ?

11

There’s an option to import bank transactions as CSV on Settings > Import/Export

12

well don’t I feel silly :rofl:

thanks alot ! i didn’t see that option. that will save alot of time for me

13

Hello @hillel and hello @ all,
I’m stuck with the main-problem from this thread here, too. And it’s quite frustrating that your own manual workflow is crashed because of the impossibility to manually mark an custumer-assigned expense as invoiced.
This should be added as an option, to link an expense to an existing invoiced article.

14

If you’d like to see a change made to the app feel free to create an issue on GitHub.