Evening All - One of my clients takes deposits from her customers, say £30. This is usually via a card payment. My Client does not issue an invoice for the deposit as she doesn't want her sales figures/reports skewed by deposits against future work.
When her customers have had their appointment, my client is very often able to sell them an extra item to the value of their deposit, and at that point will issue an invoice to include the deposit value. However, some of her customers do ask for their deposit back.
I'm using Sage Instant Accounts and I import all her sales invoices from excel. As she has next-to-no repeat business I just use one Sales Ledger Customer Account.
When I see the Sales Receipts come in to the bank from Barclaycard they arrive in one lump for the entire days takings so I have been posting them on account, with a view to tidying up the ledger at year end. However, I didn't know about the Deposits and now realise that I'm going to be way out with the Sales Receipts against invoices, as there will be a number of deposits that I have no way of accounting for.
Does anyone else deal with a similar situation? I'm scratching my head a bit with this one and would appreciate some ideas!
Your client should be posting deposits to their balance sheet and should be netting the deposit off sales ledger at point of invoice; otherwise the accounts may not give true position of the business.
One potential procedure to record deposits is for your client to keep and update records of deposits in excel format, which can be reflected in the accounting system by you; in your role as their bookkeeper.
