Paying invoice without invoice number?

My situation is this:

BACKGROUND: Weekly, we create invoices that go to a number of clients. Our clients are subsets of various corporate entities, so that we may bill the Corporate client at site A, Site B, and so forth. Our invoices are sent to the site and approved by the project manager and then on to corporate.

The project managers, internally, use Purchase Orders. For MOST of the sites, the project managers simply forward our invoice stapled to the Purchase Oder and then the AP clerk puts the invoice number on the check stub.

One project manager, for whatever reason, does not forward our invoice but only his purchase order. Consequently, the check stub from the client lists a series of invoices and, for that one site, their purchase order number instead of our invoice number.

The invoices are always the same amount so it is impossible for me to precisely match the payment to the invoice.

I could just arbitrarily assign each incoming payment to the oldest invoice for that site but that's probably just putting off the issue. The first time a payment is questioned, their records would probably show an invoice as paid that we show as open.

I'm working on getting this fellow to comply with the prevailing practice but in the meantime, I need to keep my accounting system squared away.

MY NEED: Some way to record the payment (even if temporarily) while keeping track well enought to eventually go back and sort this all out, while at the same time having the outstanding AR all in balance.

Any ideas?

Reply to
jnttsh
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Yes, record their PO#'s on your invoices! Then it is a simple matter of looking at your open invoices for the PO#'s on the stub before you record the payment. If that isn't enough just modify a collections report to show the PO# as a column.

Reply to
Golden California Girls

GCG had a good suggestion if you can get the PO number for that site/week. If the job super isn't helpful with this then maybe corporate A/P can fax you a list.

You already had the answer for your temp fix and that's to pay the oldest invoice listed for that site.

Reply to
scfundogs

Golden California Girls,

Good idea but in my case I'm still wondering -- the reason: We send the invoice to the site. The project manager then puts a p.o. number to it, and forwards it to corporate. We aren't privy to the po#.

Now, I might be able to work it out where he notifys me of the po number but I'm looking for a quick tracking fix pending the time I am anticipating it will take to get all of us on the same page so that we can just end up using our invoice numbers.

With that >

Reply to
jnttsh

Scfundogs,

Aha! Between you and Golden California Gals, methinks I may have hit on the solution.

It's a shame to have to put their corporate AP lady and me to extra work, but I could call corporate weekly and ask what p.o. number was submitted for that week from that site. Knowing that, I can then keep a list of that p.o. and my invoice. When the check stub comes in, I look up the p.o. number and record the payment against that invoice. Beautiful.

Meantime, the real solution is for the site manager to simply forward a copy of the invoice to corporate so that corporate KNOWS what invoice is being paid. Otherwise, corporate is just as clueless as I am about what is being paid.

Thanks again -- I think that will work.

John.

Reply to
jnttsh

Golden California Girls,

You'll note that between you and the other pers>Yes, record their PO#'s on your invoices! Then it is a simple matter of looking at

Reply to
jnttsh

New rule for customers, well this one anyway, "We can't ship until you give us the PO#."

I'm surprised their A/P isn't all over this guys butt to provide the invoice matched to the PO!

Reply to
Golden California Girls

Send the problem account an invoice with an additional charge:

"Processing fee $0.01"

His payment should stand out from the rest.

Hey, it was just an idea!

Reply to
HeyBub

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