Recurring customer payments

The ability to memorize a group of sales receipts and have them post on a monthly basis is not a new feature. What does importing from Excel have to do with this? You are not giving us enough imformation.

Sorry, I've been trying to memorize sales receipts for a long time and Intuit has consistently told me it can't be done. I thought that the upgrade would finally help me accomplish this.

So my problem is that I have sales receipts (120 of them) each month and want to automate this. When you take in money on a sales receipt, of course, it affects the customer balance, the income account tied to the item sold and the bank balance. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks so much. I hope this clarifies things.

Karen

There must be something else you are not telling us.

- I've been able to memorize sales receipts since at least QB 2001. What happens when YOU try? Any error message? "Intuit" told you it can't be done? What, you phoned and asked? Did they tell you **why**?

- Sales receipts do **NOT** affect a customer balance.

Nope, you haven't clarified anything.

Perhaps I'm not using the correct terminology. Forgive me.

I create an invoice for each member. I take payments on these invoices from each member monthly. I want to memorize this so that I don't have to enter those who have money debited directly from their accounts each month. I want the cash to show up in my bank (so that I can do a Banking Make Deposits); I want the customer balance to be reduced by the amount of the payment. I want the income account that it's all tied to to reflect this income.

I'm actually accepting Customer payments. This is what I want to memorize. When I try to memorize this, there is no menu selection available. So I thought I could do this with a journal entry, but of course you can only affect two of the three areas I mentioned with that. So that option is out. I contacted Intuit several times and they said no, can't do it.

Now the folks at Intuit are telling me I can create a spreadsheet with all of the fields I want to affect and import it. They seem to think I can do this now.

Any clearer?

Karen

!-! wrote:

Probably since QB 1999 I'll have to check.

Yes they do, but since the payment is made at the same time as invoicing the balance stays the same.

Yes, you need to learn about sales receipts. Look it up in help.

The payments come in after the invoicing. I invoice once for a large balance and the customer is paying it off monthly. So shouldn't the customer balance be reducing?

What is the process for memorizing these customer payments if I don't see it on the menu?

Karen

The Journal report for a Sales Receipt shows no entry to A/R, and there is no entry in the Customer Register. I'm using Canadian editions, maybe the US version is different.

Contine to enter all 120 each month manually.

Finally !

Customer payments cannot be memorized because one of the primary purposes of this transaction is to apply payment to one or more specific invoices. You can't memorize the payment because the invoices don't exist yet.

I have no experience with importing, so I can't comment on that possibility.

But why not use Sales Receipts instead of Invoices for your direct-deposit members? Sales Receipts **CAN** be memorized. Sales Receipts are recorded in Income and can either be posted directly to your bank or can be posted to Undeposited Funds whence you can make a deposit. Sales Receipts do not affect the Customer's account (Accounts Receivable) - the account is neither increased by the sale, nor decreased by the payment - and therefore are not included in Customer Statements, but they are included in various reports (Quick Report, Sales reports, etc.).

Allan disagrees with me about Sales Receipts affecting the Customer's account. It should be simple enough for you to experiment with one Sales Receipt to determine which of us is correct - if HE is correct, then Sales Receipts should be exactly what you need; if I am correct, you may still be able to use them anyway.

Karen, please learn the difference between an Invoice, a Sales Receipt, and a Customer Payment.

If you are refering to the customer register then we are in agreement. Sales receipts do not appear in the ledger. However they do show up in other reports and in version 2006 the customers and jobs screen.

It should be simple enough for you to experiment with one

I think so. You have a non-profit organization and you invoice each customer periodically (annually?) for amounts that are due monthly (dues?).

For members who send in their payments, you use the 'Receive Payments' window to individually apply the checks/CC payments etc. to the previously generated invoice, and to deposit the money into your bank account.

You have around 120 members who have authorized you to take payments directly from their accounts. You want to automate the process of receiving the payments.

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You wanted to automate using memorized j/e entries, and in my opinion, that will be the easiest/best option for you. I don't understand why the Intuit rep you spoke to said it could not be done, or why you didn't think you would be able to accomplish this. You stated "I want the cash to show up in my bank (so that I can do a Banking Make Deposits); I want the customer balance to be reduced by the amount of the payment. I want the income account that it's all tied to to reflect this income."

For each of your automatic payment customers, create a j/e that debits Accounts Receivable for the amount (inserting the customer name in the Name field), and credits the bank account (or undeposited funds, if you will be using the Make Deposits window).

A/R, customer balance, and bank balance will all be correct. As for the income account, that account was (or should have been!) affected at the time you created the invoice.

What you will *NOT* accomplish in this manner is APPLYING the payment to the previously generated invoice. There is an option within QB for automatically applying payments to open invoices. "From the Edit menu, choose Preferences, and then select the Sales & Customers icon. Click the Company Preferences tab." If the majority of your customers are expected to make partial payments on a single invoice, you might want to leave this option checked.

"Automatically apply payment" will not change the behaviour of the Journal Entry - So far as I know, the only way to apply payments to invoices is through the "Receive Payment" transaction. I said I have no experience with importing transactions, but I'll nevertheless venture that I doubt that method will apply payments to invoice either.

"L" wrote >

There is no indication that the OP did not understand those differences. Her original post was titled 'recurring customer payments' and included the statement "I want to automate the transaction for receipt of these payments in QuickBooks"

It was Allan who responded "The ability to memorize a group of sales receipts and have them post on a monthly basis is not a new feature", and you really should not fault Karen for assuming Allan was using a different nomenclature for what she had actually asked for in her original post. Her reply to Allan was that she had been "trying to memorize sales receipts for a long time and Intuit has consistently told me it can't be done"

When you jumped on that same bandwagon, she realized you BOTH had misinterpreted her original post, and clarified "I create an invoice for each member. I take payments on these invoices from each member monthly. I want to memorize this so that I don't have to enter those who have money debited directly from their accounts each month." IMO Karen could not have been more clear!

Sales receipts WILL NOT WORK for her situation.

Her organization invoices for amounts that are due in monthly increments over time.

Replacing those invoices with sales receipts for the automatic payment customers is a break from her organization's procedures. The customer balances will no longer show the amount still due. The A/R will no longer reflect the total amount of memberships coming in.

While there are certainly good, compelling reasons to assign income as it falls due, it is evidentially NOT the procedure used by the non-profit in this case.

I was afraid it might be the case.

From looking at the sample IIF files for importing customer payments I would be inclined to agree with you, as invoice number is not even a field in the transaction.

I would still be inclined to use memorized journal entries to record the automatic payments, as the balances will all reflect accurately. There would of course be a requirement to periodically open the Receive Payment window for each of the automatic payees, and to apply the credits created by the journal entries to the invoices.

You should also mention that changing methods would probably bring down the wrath of god and each member in the organization would end up burning in hell for all eternity.

Only complete idiots would entertain ever changing how things are done. Stay the course, no matter what.

Lacking your clairvoyance, I missed the possible (probable?) interpretation of Karen's third message that she invoices annually but collects monthly. I also failed to read her mind to realize that she only misused the term Sales Receipt in order to tease Allan and confuse others who might try to help.

Nevertheless - given that she's not satisfied with her current procedures, that she is going to change them, I suggest that Sales Receipts may be worth consideration. Neither memorized Journal Entries nor importing from Excel is a perfect solution. Sales Receipts may not work as a simple replacement for Invoices, but saving the effort of applying 120 payments each month may justify further procedural modifications.

I doubt we understand Karen's needs well enough to decide which is the best solution.

OK, Sales Receipts w>