How to record the payment which received before service offered?

nicokainlei

I am new to wave and I look for your helps and advises for my situation.

I offer tutorial service to customer. I will charge the customer in current month and offer service in next month (that means I receive the payment before the service offer). If using recurring invoice function, the invoice will be create 1st next month, which I cannot record the payment I already received this month, that cannot reflect the cash flow and profit immediately.

May I know if anyone encounter this situation as well and get a solution of them? Thank you very much for your advise in advance.

Ray_S

I too, am facing this same situation. The only way I know how to do it, at this point, is to manually create an invoice for the future and then record the payment for that invoice (dated for the present). Be nice if wave would make it so you could put in future payments and then wave would see that credit and automatically credit the invoice when it becomes due.

Samd

Hey @Ray_S and @nicokainlei - this will require a bit of a workaround, but there are a couple of ways you could record this in Wave.

First step though would be to head to Accounting > Chart of Accounts, and generate a new liability account called Customer Deposits. Back on the transactions page, record an income transaction into your Customer Deposit liability in the amount and time of deposit (if you have your bank connected, you can just categorize this transaction that was already imported instead). If you will be accepting deposits from multiple customers, it may be a good idea to have a liability account setup per customer, unless you're tracking exactly how much of the balance is allocated to each customer outside of Wave in a spreadsheet.

When an invoice for that customer is generated, you could then create a journal transaction from Customer Deposit over to an income account. To close the invoice, you'll need to edit it to add a line item with the value of the deposit in negative, which discounts it into being paid off (this step is necessary to avoid double reporting the income from the transfer over from Customer Deposit, as if you mark it as paid you wouldn't be able to link the two transactions).

You could definitely still use recurring invoices for this, but toggle the sending to manual during periods when your customer has paid in advance. This will generate an individual invoice in Sales > Invoices for you to send out, or apply a credit to as noted above. During periods where the customer hasn't pre-paid, you can leave automatic mailing on.