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I've been on Sage Accounts Pro (V21) for just over a year now & I'm getting my house in order to send info to my accountant for the last financial year, but I'm having some difficulty balancing customer payments off against the relevant invoices...

I don't use Sage for much other than generating supplier purchase orders & calculating VAT returns, so there wasn't much (any) priority put on allocating customer payments & I had wrongly assumed that it would be easy to bulk allocate payments to invoices at the end of the year, but it looks like I may have been wrong.

Customer payments come from either PayPal or card provider & for say PayPal (which we transfer funds from on a weekly basis into our bank account) the plan was to enter the relevant transfers into Sage to give a gross total for the year & then bulk allocate said funds to all the relevant customer invoices. The problem is that when invoices are transferred into Sage, a customer account is created for each customer & looking at the standard "Customer receipt" entry method, payments can only be allocated to one specific customer at a time.

Is there any way through the standard UI, with some accountant trickery / knowledge or possibly with an aftermarket add-on that payments can be allocated in bulk or to more than one customer account at once?

Thanks.

You are caught between a rock and a hard place due to the way you have set this up.

The way you could have done it was :-

to record the payments to a separate "Payment Provider" bank account, the easy way to do this is on the invoice at the time you create the invoice using the payment tab and ticking the box to allocate to the customer on update.
Then you record the transfer of monies form the payment provider bank account to your main bank account as bank transfers.

There are other ways, you could have put all the invoices on a single websales account and then you could have matched your one receipt against several invoices, it is not a great way but it avoids having lots of customer accounts that you don't need as they have paid upfront.

If you have a lot of invoices, it is probably worth looking at using a third party to help you by importing the invoices and the payments. Having just said that I hasten to add that a lot of "Web" people don't have much of a clue about sage, or accounting. I recently came across a set of data with 400,000 customer accounts, because the import tool created a new account for each customer, it would have been sensible in that case to do a bit of both suggestions above, have a separate bank account, do the transfers, put all the websales on one customer account with the payments being automatically matched as the invoices were updated.

As for fixing this, well there is no easy way because things have been done the way they have. You need to go back and do it one way or the other, credit of all the invoices form individual accounts and put them on the one you used for the receipts you have. Or reverse the receipts you have and do them all as bank transfers and individual receipts.

I guess you need to decide how you are resolving this going forward and then use whatever fits in with the long term solution.

Using export and import, it should not be too difficult to do unless there are mistakes (the reason we do these things as we go is so that if there are mistakes we can fix them quickly and easily whilst we can remember what happened) if there are issues now, if monies got clawed back and you are/were unaware of it then it may well have to be written off.

Bruce,

Thank you for your reply.

I've used Sage in a previous job & appreciate the logic of posting as you go, but with what I'm doing now it's just a bit of a burden as balancing is assured the way we operate - I just missed the inability to bulk allocate over different accounts (guess I should have studied it a bit better before implementing...).

I'm gone round the houses & got in touch with a provider who seems to be able to offer a solution & appears to be more than aware of the inner working & the implications from an accountancy point of view, so fingers crossed!

Thanks again.