Hi all,
happy new year!
Could you please update us on the current progress? I discovered “Handle negative payments - update client.paid_to_date” in the realease notes of v5.3.42 but couldn’t find anything in the UI that can be tested.
Just let us know if we need to test something. Happy to help.
Thanks a lot,
Gijs
This is on my list to discuss with @hillel this week.
v5.3.48 now has this functionality as discussed above.
In order to “complete” the payment on the credit note, simply Mark Paid a negative credit note.
If you could please provide some early feedback it would be great appreciated!
@david Awesome, I’ll test it and let you know what we think. Cheers 
Hi @david
Thanks fpr this update. I have created a negative credit and I have marked it as paid succesfully. The payment is listed in the payments overview.
In the overview the credit is still listed as sent, not as paid or applied.
But overall this is something I can work with.
I have tried to enter a payment directly and that would’nt work. The credit was not available as an option at “invoice” and when I select the credit a bit lower at “credit”, it says that I need to pick an invoice in order to apply a credit.
And then there is one thing that might be an issue for some of the users. A credit as used in invoiceninja v5 is like a deposit. A customer pays an amount and now has a positive credit with the company.
The company then works for the client and creates an invoice. Instead of paying the invoice, the credit “pays” (partly) for the invoice since the client has already paid this amount upfront.
@bramdriesen and I were talking about a credit note which is usually the opposite of an invoice. The client orders a painting, pays it and the painting gets shipped. The painting is damaged during shipping and the merchant and the client decide that the client keeps the painting but will get a 20% discount.
Since the invoice has already been created and can’t/shouldn’t be changed, a credit note needs to be created. On the balance this credit note is at the opposite side of the invoice. Depending on of the payment of the invoice was already 100% done, the client will receive a payment or the amount on the credit note will apply to the invoice, if that was not completely paid.
So a credit has already a negative value on the balance for the merchant. A negative credit, as in your example, it mathematically a positive balance for the merchant.
Here an example how a negative payment could apply to a regular credit note. But that means that credits needs to be negative on the balance. Eventually there should be a difference between a credit as it exists right now (like a deposit) and a new type called credit note, which acts as an opposite invoice.
But lets see what Bram means.
Thanks a lot,
Gijs
In the overview the credit is still listed as sent, not as paid or applied.
But overall this is something I can work with.
I have checked in a fix for this, the credit will now appear as APPLIED after this action
I think this particular piece of functionality is a complimentary addition rather than a replacement for a positive credit note.
The intent of the negative credit is to reflect a return of funds to a client where the negative credit + negative payment indicates a refund (this is why the clients paid to date decreases after this).
It is also possible to utilise a positive credit note which would reflect a credit in the clients favour which can be retained on file for future use against other invoices if the credit is to be kept on file rather than refunded.
These types of credits can be used within the payment screen and applied to invoices as payments.
Let me know your thoughts.
Hello @david, I’ve been following this thread for a while as I too needed negative credit notes the way it’s been described here. I managed to note reimbursements until now by using negative invoices and negative payments, but properly labeled credit notes will be even better. Thanks for adding this feature.
This is working well in my tests, but I noticed that if a negative created credit is marked as paid while it’s still a draft, this will create a payment with a null value ($0.) In comparison, when an invoice is still a draft but it’s mark as paid, a payment will be created for its full amount. To prevent the null payment of the credit not, an additional step of marking it as sent must be done, and only then can the payment reflect the amount of the negative credit. Is this normal?
As a (lengthy) sidenote, I don’t mean to highjack the thread, but I think this is related: regarding the positive credit notes, I’m a bit confused about how they work. You said:
As @ecomsilio said, if that’s some kind of deposit, it makes sense to me:
I could not find the exact workflow to reproduce this, however, since I can’t seem to apply a blank payment to a positive credit.
Nontheless, apparently credits can also be created without being linked to payments with real money, and those credits can then be used to pay real invoices. I was wondering, is there a way for them to be deducted from an invoice instead of applied to them? Because as I understand the way it works currently, positive credits can be used without associated payments as some kind of “virtual money” that can be used for a new payment, and I get why that would work in some cases, but IMO it poses a problem when taxes are involved. In fact, if sales taxes are charged, usually they have to be paid back to the government. But what happens if there was no actual payment, only a “virtual payment” with “virtual money” ? One would have to pay back taxes with real money from a real account, even if those taxes were never really paid by the client. Same goes for income taxes: with credit notes as payments, one would have to declare revenues that are in fact never really earned, since they involved virtual money.
For instance, here I created an invoice with sales taxes that is completely “paid” with a credit or virtual money of the same value that I created without a “real” payment ever being made/noted:
The credit is at $0 and the invoice is fully paid.
For some reason the payment is shown as “unapplied”
and when I click on “apply”, I only get to choose a Payment Number, and clicking “apply” once more does nothing.So yeah, this part really confuses me (and thanks in advance for anyone explaining it to me), but the part of paying the invoice with the “virtual” credit note did work.
My underlying question is: would it be possible to create a credit (say, for saying thanks to a regular client for his past business) that could be used like a rebate on file that could be deducted from future invoices, thus lowering their total (and the taxes applied to them) ? This would prevent “virtual” taxes and “virtual revenues” from being calculated in the reports.
I must add that the whole credit entity is pretty puzzling overall to me, since it means different stuff for different people (hence this very thread), and I would too have expected overpaid amounts to be available as credits, as discussed in the following thread (instead of separate “unapplied” payments that can be hard to track):
How or where do we see a customer’s credit on their account? - Hosted • invoicing.co | v5 - Discourse (invoiceninja.com)
Maybe there could be a new setting to automatically link unapplied payments to positive credits? That would make the whole “credit” thing more comprehensive and intuitive, IMO. But still, thanks for working on negative credits for now.
I’ve checked in a fix for this.
It is important to consider Credits as Cash equivalents. What it sounds like you want to achieve is separate functionality where you provide a discount coupon which acts to reduce the price of services/goods before a payment / tax event has been actualised.
In the future we hope to support these directly within invoices, currently we have coupons in our Subscriptions feature however the scope is quite narrow.
