Invoicing

[lyn]

Hi

I wonder if anyone can help. Jut started a new year on sage and am new to the business. Invoices are being raised in a month ie 5 November, however the invoice can cover a period of 3 months.The end on one month the whole of the month the invoice is in and the beginning of the next month. What is the easiest way to split the invoice so the charge is in each of the three months.

We are a care provider and supply one invoice for a month in advance and one invoice every 28 days in advance this causes us terrible problems and and help would be really appreciated
hanks

[brucedenney]

The bottom line is that if you are invoicing every 28 days, then there will be, once a year, a month where you will get 2 lots of 28days worth of invoicing!

There are a number of ways to deal with this.

If there are hundreds of invoices and there is always a couple of odd ones coming into a month twice then this is a minor fluctuation in income and you can just ignore it as it is not material to the overall profitability.

Adjust your income. To adjust your income you need to calculate what has been invoiced in each period and what has not been invoiced in each period. The way to do this is to have an invoicing schedule in a spreadsheet and to calculate for each month what the adjustment needs to be. What the adjustment needs to be will vary depending on being invoiced in advance or in arrears and the period invoice versus the size of the accounting period.

If all your clients were invoiced every 28 days on the same dates then you could do 4 week accounting and have 13 accounting periods in the year and not bother with any adjustments on sales, you might just move the problem and need to adjust purchases if you have big monthly expenditures eg salaries)

From the sounds of things you need option 2 as you have a mixture of things going on. (In theory you can do prepayments and accruals in Sage, however for this sort of complex setup, where you have people coming and going with different start and stop dates and so on, it would be much easier to administer and control in a spreadsheet)

[lyn]

Hello and Thank you for your reply, I was of the opinion only a spread sheet would work as yes hundreds of invoices all in advance with no set start date. I was just hoping for a miracle really, or a super idea that was not time consuming, at least after your reply I know that my first thought as yours was correct.

Many thanks

Lynne

[brucedenney]

A spread sheet shouldn't be to hard to do...