2.5 % discount upon payment of an debtor invoice

Geraldine
Geraldine Member Posts: 16
edited February 2020 in Accounts Hosted
Hi Our company uses Reckon Hosted (NZ) and we have a large Food Distributor as a customer, they pay the bills for all the stores under their umbrella. We have set the individual stores up as Jobs in our hosted system, so we invoice the job (stores) and it charges it to the Head Office. Under the terms of the agreement, the Customer takes 2.5% discount off each invoice at the time of payment. At present we are having to do sales adjustment notes for the 2.5% discount against the individual invoices - which are against jobs before we can receipt the payment. With lots of stores under this customer, there is a lot of sales adjustments needed to do, and this is a very long drawn out process just to receipt the customers payment and allocate it against every invoice. As the stores are set up as jobs, we are unable to do a sales adjustment and apply it to the customer and then allocate it to the stores, as Reckon hosted does not allow this. Therefore we need to raise invoices against each store and apply them to the original invoice, to then be able to allocate the payment receipted to the main customer account, which brings up all the invoices under that account. Therefore I would like to know if there is a way to set up a 2.5% discount (similar to prompt payment discount) that can be applied at time of receipting the customer's payment. We have been advise we are unable to add the discount line to the invoice at time of invoicing, as the customer does not want the stores to see the discounted invoices. Hopefully I have explained this clear enough. I have seen on previous Quickbook videos on youtube that one can edit the payment terms and show a discount percentage but these boxes do not appear when I edit the payment terms.. The image shot below is what I saw on a Quicbook video. Any help or assistance would be much appreciated. I have tried technical support but they do not understand what I am trying to achieve. image Thanks

Comments

  • Shane_6461899
    Shane_6461899 Reckon Staff Posts: 339 Reckon Staff
    edited February 2020
    Hi Geraldine,

    Reckon Accounts doesn't have that feature sorry.  The only ways you have already mentioned, adding on the invoice as a discount item, or using adjustment notes and applying to the invoice.  I will pass this on as a feature request.

    Regards,
    Shane.
  • Geraldine
    Geraldine Member Posts: 16
    edited April 2016
    Thanks for your prompt reply Shane. Did this use to be a feature in Quickbooks back in 2011, as from some youtube videos it suggests there used to be a possible way to do this via setting up terms against the customer accounts and it would apply a percentage discount, when paid, you would then have to do a credit memo to adjust the original invoice. Which is why they used to have the extra two boxes in the Edit Terms box to allow a person to put in a percentage? Why would they change this? Does Reckon actually take on board any feature requests? It seems from many old forum posts some good suggestions have been raised, but still none have been implemented. How often does Reckon Hosted release new features? I find the helpdesk at Reckon very unhelpful when it comes to asking questions. Regards Geraldine
  • John G
    John G Reckon Staff Posts: 1,570 Reckon Staff
    edited February 2017
    Hi Geraldine,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    Suggestions are passed up to the product developers who will take them on board in their normal cycle of product development.  When a suggestion is acted on depends on many factors, 

    The function to apply a percentage discount for prompt payment on the Receive Payment screen was part of QuickBooks up until 2005 when other updates to the programme caused a conflict with this function, and it was deactivated.  All references to this function were removed over subsequent years.  I do not recall earlier Australian versions having the ability to apply a discount for early payment at the Terms level. 

    The image you provided looks like it is from the American version (from Intuit) and not the Australian/NZ version (still called QuickBooks in 2010, but its year versions were 2009/10 and 2010/11).  Intuit QuickBooks guides are generally still applicable to the Australian/NZ Reckon Accounts Business versions, but the two have followed slightly different developmental path that results in some differences.  

    I hope this explains the situation a little better.  Your suggestion has been passed up the line.


    regards,
    John.

  • Shayne McNamara
    Shayne McNamara Member Posts: 43
    edited July 2018
    We also now have this issue.  so would love this feature to be implemented.  We are dealing with one of the major hardware chains and they take a discount upon payment which doesn't appear on the invoice.  we thought about going back into the invoice and applying a discount when the payment is being allocated but this will stuff up both prior period sales reporting and also GST timing.

    We would ideally like to have the individual customers set up rather than just one customer with 130 delivery addresses but I think purely because of the discount problem the latter is the way to go.  

    Our workaround which might work for you, although not ideal, is take the total discount taken and raise an adjustment note for the total discount taken.  Allocate the payment against each of the invoices in full until it is used up in full then take up the credit note and start allocating that.  That should then cover off the remaining "unpaid" amount.

    We would prefer to allocate against individual accounts rather than one central one but this should work and should be no slower than allocating a normal payment.  Cheers
  • Geraldine
    Geraldine Member Posts: 16
    edited July 2016
    This sounds very similar to what we have. We supply to Foodstuffs in NZ, a very large account that has 3 head offices, with numerous stores reporting to those head offices. The stores order from us, and we are to dispatch the items to the stores and bill the head office accordingly. They then make payment at the end of the month taking of a percentage discount of every invoice that is due for payment. We have managed to get around the one billing customer and the 130 delivery addresses by setting up the head office as a debtor (Customer) in Reckon and the individual reporting stores as jobs under that customer. This means when we can raise sales orders against the stores (the same way as a normal customer), and because it is linked to the Customer Account it is billed to the head office debtor. However the restrictions we face, is that whilst you can allocate a payment to the head office and then apply it to all the invoices it relates to on the individual stores (jobs) that are under that head office debtor (the same way one usually receipts a payment to a debtor account), it does not allow you to apply a credit note in the same way. So we are unable to do just one credit note and allocate it accordingly. Therefore we have the painful task of having to do a credit note adjustment to every store for the payment discount they take up, and before we can allocate the head office payment. It is so frustrating and time consuming. Unfortunately this Customer will not allow us to apply the discount to the invoice, so until a fix can be done, we are having to continue to do this. It is definitely great though having the stores set up individually. We are able to do sales reports and analyses the same way and we can keep all the stores individual purchases together in the one account, and does not require changing the shipping address accordingly. Hope this helps Regards Geraldine
  • Shayne McNamara
    Shayne McNamara Member Posts: 43
    edited August 2016
    Yep - this helps heaps and the Foodstuff scenario is exactly like our but with an NZ hardware chain.  Although quite experienced in Reckon I hadn't really had any exposure "jobs" which really are sub-customers when used as customers but have done some research and testing.  It will work great for allocating payments and tracking sales per store but you are right allocating a single credit can't be done.

    What we think might be a workaround and will check with our accountant is to make a "dummy" payment for the discount amount and allocate this across the various sub accounts which will show the customer bill paid in full.  The original amount paid which would be short the discount plus the dummy payment for the discount amount.

    Then we would just journal from the suspense account into an expenses account called discounts or discounts to customers.  

    Allocating the dummy payment works but haven't had a chance to test the journals and make sure the GST returns will be correct.

    Cheers