I am writing to highlight a significant workflow issue in Zoho Books (India Edition) regarding Vendor Advances and Bills.
The Scenario:
I recorded an Advance Payment to a vendor.
I matched/reconciled this payment in the Banking module.
I received a Bill from the vendor and applied the Advance to that Bill.
I now need to Unlink that advance from the bill (the amount needs to be split differently).
The Problem: Currently, there is no "Unlink" button. The only option under the "Payments Made" tab of the Bill is to Delete the payment.
When I click Delete:
I get a warning that the transaction is "Matched or Categorized."
If I proceed to unmatch and delete, Zoho completely deletes the original Payment/Advance record from the system.
This forces me to manually re-categorize the bank statement line and recreate the Advance record from scratch.
The Ask: Why is there no simple "Unlink" or "Remove Application" button? In accounting, unlinking a payment from an invoice should simply return the payment to an "Unused" status. It should not delete the underlying financial transaction that has already been reconciled with the bank.
This current "Delete" workflow is dangerous for data integrity and creates unnecessary manual work for users.
Is there a way to safely unlink these without deleting the record, or is this a feature currently in development?