Better treatment of advance payments and "bulk" payments needed
Hi,
There are two situations that are not handled well in Zoho Invoice and I hope that at some point the functionality might be improved.
1) I receive, say, a USD 2,000 advance from a customer, which I will use to pay future invoices. I can't issue an invoice for the received amount, because that would be an incorrect accounting practice. I need to be able to apply that payment as a cash balance on the clients account and then offset it against the invoices as I issue them. The only way that I can do this now is to issue a credit note for the advance. However, doing that messes up the reporting of sales total, because the credit note is treated as a negative sale rather than as a payment, therefore the sales and payments totals are no longer correct. Zoho needs to be able to distinguish a true credit note (e.g. a cancelled invoice or customer refund) from a payment credit, and adjust the sales and payments received totals accordingly.
2) A related issue; I send a client 3 invoices and he pays them all at once with a single payment. Now all I can do is issue a credit note for the payment and offset that against the invoices (but then I have the same problem as mentioned above), or I manually have to apply part of the payment against each invoice and make sure that I have done it correctly. In this case the client receives three payment confirmtations for the divided amounts instead of one confirmation for the amount sent with an indication that it was applied to three invoices.
I hope that something can be added to the Zoho Invoice work plan to fix these problems!
Mark