I have a client who only provides me with purchase invoices once they are paid. This should make posting easy as normally I would input these onto Sage as cash purchases from whichever bank account has been used and posted under the nominal code for each purchase. This is my usual method when working with other clients. However, this particular client likes each invoice to be posted to whichever supplier the invoice relates to. This means I have a pile of invoices which I have to post to Sage and then I immediately have to go into each supplier account to clear each invoice against the cheque numbers or direct payments. Does anyone have a suggestion for a quicker way of inputting these purchases where I would still be able to produce a report to show the amount of purchases made from an individual supplier each month? The client pays a lot of sub contractors and likes to be able to analyse which ones he has given the most work to each month/quarter etc.
Any ideas or am I missing something blatantly obvious? It seems a waste of my time (and of his money) to double up on the job of posting invoices and payments separately if there is a simpler way of dealing with them. As I said, I only receive the invoices when they have been paid, there are no payments on account either.
You aren't really doubling the work. All you are doing is doing all the work anyone would do but all at the same time. Where as I enter supplier invoices as and when they come in and do a payment run at the end of the month, you are entering the invoices and doing the payment run all at the same time, sort of.
The whole point of posting them to the supplier is to produce a list for credit control purposes as to what is outstanding, how much is outstanding and how long it been outstanding for.
If the invoice has already been paid by the time you are posting it then you are effectively doubling the processing ie
Dr Expenses
Cr Creditors
Dr Creditors
Cr Bank
rather than
Dr Expense
Cr Bank
Only reason can think of to post the invoice in the situation is from a VAT viewpoint if the client is accounting for VAT on an invoice basis so the correct VAT is picked up.
If they want to know how much each supplier has been paid why not use the reference box to record the supplier code in the bank payment module and export bank payments to excel, sort by reference and then total.
If you point out the way you are doing it at the moment is doubling your invoice I think the client would see the merit of doing it another way.
Steve - I see what you mean that I'm not doubling up on the work by posting the invoices then marking them as paid but I do feel it is double the work it needs to be. As this particular client is paying by the hour, it is costing him more for me to process the purchases in this way as it takes twice as long as it would be if I were just posting them as cash purchases. In one way it could serve me better to stick with the current systyem as it means more work, therefore higher invoices from me :)
Mark, your suggestion could be the way forward and does seem obvious now! I knew there would be a straightforward solution that I just couldn't think of. The particular invoices I'm dealing with are from non VAT registered suppliers so there are no VAT implications.
