Help--Credits not showing up in Receive Payments

I'm reposting this since I inadvertently typed "Q" into the followup header and probably screwed up anyone who tried to answer....day-um!

I need some help on an urgent problem. Just spent $250 on a support contract with Intuit and wasted 2 hours on the phone with no solution offered nor in sight.

A friend of mine just purchased a business and asked me to help out in getting the accounting area better organized and to set up some new invoicing procedures in QB.

The current managers there have been working with a rather cumbersome way to handle advance payments and overpayments--they post them to a current liability account as an item in an invoice and then when they want to use the advance payments/overpayments they post the same line item as a negative. It works... kind of.

I thought, well, let's just do it the normal and easy way--receive a payment and if there aren't invoices to cover it then post the remainder as an open credit. Then pay off other invoices with "Unused Credits."

I started to do this, and much to my surprise, when I go to "Receive Payments" on a customer with a credit balance, the proper amount of credit shows up at the bottom-right of the screen....but when I try to apply them--NADA. The credit isn't there!!! The "Set Credits" dialog is just empty.

To add to my puzzlement, when I created a brand-new test "customer" and recereceived a test $1,000 check against no invoices, and posted it to Open Credits, then made an invoice and went back to Receive Payments--the credit was there and able to be applied with no problems.

This seems to indicate that there might be something strange about the way the older customer:job lists are set up???

The Intuit support guy had no clue. ANY help *greatly* appreciated as this is a fast-flow business and a solution needs to be found before there is a long trail of confusion to untangle.

I'll monitor this newsgroup closely as possible, but if you've got a clue feel free to email me at snipped-for-privacy@pobox.com also.

TIA!!

"Of all the credits issued to this customer, only unused credits for this specific customer:job are displayed above."

So how to get around this??? I don't want to post advance payments/overpayments to any particular job, but to have them available to pay any invoice from any job?

Help!

Stephen Porter Los Angeles, CA

An invoice can only be paid by a credit from the *EXACT* same job. So if you have a credit memo on the customer or another job it can't be applied to a different job.

Sucks, but that is Intuit.

Oh, this is in the help file.

Work around, set up a suspense account an at item to point to that suspense account. Every time you need to use a credit, you get to make two pairs of entries. An invoice on the job where the credit memo exists and a credit memo on the job where the invoice exists. Next you'll need to do two receive payments, one on each job. There you havetransferred the credit from one job to another.

Sucks, but that is Intuit.

Oh, did I say Intuit sucks money down a black hole in India?

Good luck.

Stephen Porter wrote:

As GCG said in another reply, you can't do it. Credits only apply towards the same job. My solution for this has been to upgrade to '06 and use multiple customer ship to addresses(new in '06) instead of jobs. The possible downside to this is that if you are actually using the "Jobs" as more than just different warehouses/addresses for you customers you may lose some job reporting functionality. I wasn't, and thus this has been a perfect solution so far.

Hi GCS,

I'm going to respond to this in the "other thread"--I'll pull the quote overover....hope you can read it there and I'll kill this thread which is kind of a duplicate.....

stp

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the information. At least I know that my software isn't malfunctioning, at least in a technical sense ;-). Boy, I'm just shaking my head that this situation exists.

I'm not sure if I understand your workaround. (I'll respond to GCG's workaround with the one that had been in place and which I thought was so kludgy in the first place, but now looks like it might be as good as anything that can be done.)

As far as your solution goes, I'd like to try that also, but I'm not sure I'm following you. I guess my first question would be does QB allow you to create unlimited ship-to addresses so they can stand-in for the "Job" function?

The company in question uses jobs in a very rudimentary fashion. As I may have mentioned, it's a mailing house and they have lots of customers who do regular mailings, weekly, monthly, etc. Each time they start a new job, or even a new segment of a job, they assign it a job number and create the invoice for the job against that particular "Customer:Job". This does make it easier to track down billing/payment information on a particular job in QB, but it also has created a "Customer:Job" list from hell---screen after screen of jobs under the most active customers. From my point of view, this whole problem might be solved if we could just drop the whole concept of using jobs at all. That would solve the credit problem, right? Because then there would only be ONE Customer (with no job) against which all future invoices and payments could be posted. Before going any further, I'd like to know if I'm correct in assuming this point. If I am, then there might be some clever way to designate invoices so that one could find the particular transactions that applied to that "job".

If THAT doesn't work...well I'll have to burn my copy of QB and throw it into the Pacific Ocean... ;-). Or explore some other workaround. I wish I had 2006 handy so I could explore your multiple shipping addresses workaround too. I don't quite understand how that helps you keep "jobs" separate, though????

Thanks very much for the help. See my separate response to GCG on the method they are using currently.

Another question is how in the heck has QB sold "Job costing" as a feature of their software for so long with this gaping hole in its functionality...it almost makes it completely unworkable.

Best regards, Stephen Porter Los Angeles, CA

Quote below is from GCS... I'm pulling my response over to this thread so I can track it more easily...hoping to get more free education here on the ins and outs of this problem. I feel like a dope for just "assuming" (and telling my friend!) that "of course, QB can do this!!!

The system they have in place now is very similar to what you describe as a workaround. For the suspense account, they have created an "Advance Payments" account (Other Current Liability). When they get a check that they know will more than cover outstanding invoice and thus created a credit, they make an invoice to that customer called an "Advance Payment" invoice. Then they created an item called "Advance Payments" that is linked to that account. When they want to use some of that credit, they find the invoice with a balance and ADD another line to it using the "Advance Payment" item again, but entering it as a negative number. Then they have a report made up, which I haven't analyzed or figured out yet, that gives you a kind of summary of the "Advance Payment" account sorted by Customer. You can look up the credit balance on customers to see how much is available to apply to whichever invoice you want to pay. That's a bit of a pain too. This seems to be a bit quicker than your workaround, but suffers a bit on the audit trail side as there are no Payments to track--just negative line items in invoices....

As I mentioned in my response to Leo, I'd like to just drop Jobs if that would give back the flexibility to freely apply credits AND if there is some reasonable way to look up invoices/payments on various jobs... Maybe customer the invoice number to add some kind of job designator??? Any thoughts?

Thanks again for taking the time to help out on this!

Best regards, Stephen Porter Los Angeles, CA

----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Porter" Newsgroups: alt.comp.software.financial.quickbooks Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 7:49 PM Subject: Re: Help--Credits not showing up in Receive Payments

Yes, your assumption is correct, it would solve the credit problem. Though as you have noted, they do not stand in quite as well for actual "Jobs". The reason my work-around works well for me is that I didn't really need the actual Job function, all I really needed was multiple ship-to addresses. So, in a way, my original use of Jobs was a work-around until 2006 came out with the exact implementation I needed. 2004 was a nice step-up at the time, at least letting multiple jobs be paid from a single check, prior to that, I needed to do a receive payment for each job, which entailed splitting up all the various invoices paid (some times 30 - 40) on that check up into groups by looking each invoice up and seeing which job it went too. Quite the pain.

I am not sure how many ship-to's you are allowed for each customer. The most I have set-up right now is 6 for one customer. I looked in the help menu and it doesn't say anything about max quantities there either.

Yes, many people have complained on the forums here over the years about just that.

I'll check out 2006 later and see if it might help. For now, though I think we'll just go with the simple solution and devise an invoice-coding system that will help with locating particular invoices by "job". Any suggestions along that line?

Add my name to the list. Do you have any experience with any small-business software that has the capability to apply open credits whereever one would like to?

TIA.

Stephen LA, CA