Profit and loss overstating sales

harveydt

When I look at my profit and loss account, my profit seems to be about twice what it really is.
So I click into "Sales" and I can see a list of invoices raised and payments received, which suggests to me that an invoice for £1 is treated as a sale, and that receipt of the £1 payment is treated as a sale.

If I click into the transactions, it seems to be correctly showing the invoices as "Sales" and the payment as "Invoice Payment", which makes sense.

Any ideas why my sales/turnover is being overstated in the P&L and what I need to do to correct it?

Michelle_A

Thanks for reaching out @harveydt! So, there's a couple of reasons why your income may appear as duplicated- this often happens when an income transaction associated with an invoice is imported from your bank connection after the payment has already been recorded in app. I'll pass on a handy guide that shows recommended workarounds which hopefully should help, but let us know if you have any more questions! https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000423886-How-do-I-ensure-my-invoice-income-isn-t-duplicated-

MerlinAccounts_UK

Wouldn't it be more practical to treat the payment received when first entered as being received into the cash account rather than the bank, then, when importing your bank the money deposited is simply treated as being a cash banking rather than being allocated to the sales invoice again? Just seems to me the workaround involves extra work that ought not be necessary ie deleting or merging transactions. What do you think? Is this not doable?

Regards

Andrew

harveydt

Hmmm... I don't think that's the cause, Michelle, because I don't flag an invoice as paid until I see the cash in the account.

The merge function looks like it works to the most part, but I'm not sure what it will do where the payment doesn't match precisely to the invoice amount, and with the necessity to manually merge items, it calls into question the data integrity.

There are loads of things I like about Wave, and would like to find a way to run my books through it, but think I'm going to have to abandon it for now given I simply cannot trust that its reports are accurate :-(

James_Hudson

Hey @harveydt, to add to @Michelle_A and @AndrewPriestley 's suggestions, there's a third way to account for the invoice payments that Wave posts and the bank transactions that are imported to record your sales.

This method is particularly useful if the sales transactions post a couple of days after the Wave transactions are recorded. It involves recording the invoice payment to a Money in Transit account, and then recording a transfer from Money in Transit to your bank account:

https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000389783-Recording-Check-Payments-in-Transit

Hope this helps!