Drilling into contradictory balance due data - Quicken H&B 2012 [Edited]
I have quicken h&b 2012, and I regularly invoice my clients with it, and register the deposits they make. I have a client that has been paying irregular amounts, because he uses zelle, and because he's just not very organized. With most clients, I invoice once a month and sometime during the month they pay down the full amount. This particular client gets billed more frequently, and pays at erratic intervals. zelle only allows 3k per day, so it's super rare that he's ever had a zero balance.
I think I know how much he owes, but the amount showed by quicken doesn't match.
How I have tested so far.
[1] compare the invoices for the client I have records of with what has been paid into my bank account for this client. The invoices are actually build outside of quicken, and then I reproduce them in quicken. There is no contradiction between what quicken shows and what the other program shows for invoiced total. The amount deposited in my bank account vs the invoice totals results in a net balance due of $2040.
[2] In quicken I run a report for the payer. that report shows what was entered as an invoice and what has been entered as a payment by the client. These amounts match the above exactly: 2040 is the balance due.
[3] the contradition is on the "business" tab in quicken where it lists any invoices that have a balance due. That shows two invoices with a total balance due of 3040. That's suspiciously different by exactly $1000, but I can't tell how.
It seems very odd to me that quicken's report by payee doesn't arrive at the same amount that the separate invoice balances due does.
I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this? There are no credits etc other than payments via zelle etc.
Thanks
Comments
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Input on this???
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To get to the bottom of this, you'd need someone to perform a full audit of all transactions you ever entered for this customer, to narrow down what this could be.
I'm assuming that you always recorded all payments made by this customer as proper "New Customer Payment" transactions, marking prior invoices as paid in the process.
If you ever recorded payments received "thru the backdoor", as transfers from the checking account to the Customer Invoices account, you will have noticed that they appear as refunds or credits, not as payment transactions. The New Customer Payment transaction dialog has a field, "Apply existing credits", which must be checkmarked to include these types of transactions and make the amount available to pay invoices.
And if you ever made a spelling variation to the customer name, some money may be in limbo and was not applied to the real customer name.0 -
It could even be a $500 that was entered the wrong causing a 1,000 difference.
I'm staying on Quicken 2013 Premier for Windows.
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I'll check both of those. But for sure, I always enter payments by choosing the oldest invoice that is not paid down (as listed by quicken) and then using the "enter a payment" dialog, or whatever it's called.
I have already run the report for this customer that shows in/out, and it arrives at the amount that makes sense to me. The deposits reflected in that report align with the bank records of deposits from that customer. I'm not sure in what other manner I can attempt to audit the amount shown in the business tab, which is 1000 higher?
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How can I audit the amount shown on the "business" tab as balance due invoices?
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I think the thing to look for is whether every invoice payment received has been applied to the invoice it was intended to pay for. It's not enough that the amount of payments received equal the amount invoiced: the payments received must be properly credited to the invoice they pay.
One approach to locating unpaid invoices is to take advantage of the fact that when an invoice has been paid in full, it's Cleared Status (its "Clr" column) goes from blank to "c".
You can run a Banking > Transaction report for the Invoice account(s) in question, customizing the report to include only "Not cleared" (not fully paid) invoice transactions. [See the "Status" section of the Advanced tab in the report Customize dialog.]
You can double-click on a transaction in the report and be taken to the actual transaction in its Invoice account register.
If you find invoices that you know you have received full payment for, but their invoice transaction Cleared Status is blank; payment transaction(s) have not been properly linked to the invoice.
In my testing I have seen payments meant for an invoice that were not assigned to that invoice.
One way (not necessarily the only way) that can happen is what UKR alluded to earlier in this discussion: the payment is originally entered in the Quicken checking account register representing the real-world account where the check was deposited, categorized as a transfer to the invoice account. Typically that will leave the invoice account payment transaction NOT assigned to the invoice it is intended to pay.
If you have a payment transaction in an invoice account that should be assigned to an invoice, but is not: try keying the Invoice Number in the PMT transaction Invoice# column - that should link the two.
[NOTE: a single left-click on the Customer Name in the Business tab "Unpaid Customer Invoices" list will take you directly to that invoice in its invoice account, where you can verify which, if any, payments have been assigned to that invoice.]-JP
Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list0 -
I don't get notifications from this website for some reason so I didn't see your reply until now. Thanks - what a great response. I'll go through your ideas and see what surfaces, will post back here.
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