Payments, credits and invoices cannot be changed once they have been applied. Drastic accounting moves would need to be made in order to accomplish a task with very little net change in the information presented. Any of the following proposed workarounds will affect reporting, appear in ledgers, and potentially affect functionality.
Ideally, no corrections should be made to the allocation and the customer should be pressed to pay off all outstanding balances. Stax Bill operates primarily around the customer's outstanding balances. The automation will typically apply payments to the older debts first. Regardless of which invoices are paid off, the customer will remain in poor standing until all overdue invoices are paid. A customer's statement will display the current and outstanding balances over time as payments and invoices are added to the account.
If it is necessary to adjust the allocation, record a refund in a special manner (detailed below) and then record the payment again in a similar way:
- This method will affect ledgers (cash + AR Balance) and reporting (cash/collections) the net changes will be $0
- Consult with any other finance team members prior to performing this method.
- If a statement is generated, these corrections will appear on that statement
- Consider any communications that will automatically occur for this customer. You may want to disable outgoing emails for this specific customer while you are performing these corrections.
- Record a full refund as cash, check, or direct deposit.
- Leave a reference to inform your team why this was issued (Correcting allocations)
- This will not go to the gateway and will not directly refund the money directly to the customer. Instead, it will affect their balances only.
- This will, however, break the ability to send the refund through the gateway using Stax Bill. If you need to issue a refund at a later time. A refund can still be recorded later, and issued through your gateway directly.
- If this was a Credit (not a reversal) reverse the credit and reapply it.
- Leave a reference to inform your team why this was issued
- Record the payment again as Cash, Check, or Direct Deposit.
- Leave a reference to inform your team why this was issued (Correcting allocations)