Supplier Refund negative total.

Thanks for the clarification. Not being an accountant or bookkeeper I was concerned about the two negative amounts for the credit and deposit. As long as that's how it's supposed to be then that's great.

Hi,

This isn't how it's supposed to be...  the deposit, money back into the account, should show as a positive figure - opposite to the supplier credit, and the bill payment.  Yes, the value on the open balance may be right, but the total value of the transactions is not.

Bills, invoices from a supplier, are shown as a positive value.

Bill Payments, payments to the supplier, are shown as negative values, so the total value on the account is zero once all bills have been paid.

Supplier credits are also negative values, so when these are matched off against corresponding bills and bill payments, again, the sum total is zero.

A deposit, the opposite of a bill payment, is shown as a negative value, the same as a bill payment and a supplier credit, and it is impossible to then net this down to zero.

This doesn't make any sense at all!

Does this then in turn affect other reports?

This will not affect the reporting, Selina.

In QuickBooks, a debit on your account will show as a positive amount, while credit will show as negative. Any expense, checks, or supplier credit will show negative in both credit cards and checking accounts.

I've added this link that talks about how the reporting in QuickBooks works: QuickBooks reports.

As always, I'm just around to help. Stay safe!

Hi, 

So in this case, a supplier credit and a deposit are opposites - the supplier credit is the amount owed to you, and the deposit is the settlement of that 'debt'.   Has this issue been raised as something which needs to be fixed by your developers? The value of the transactions at the bottom will always be wrong unless this is fixed?

I don't mean to be difficult but this is a fundamental error.  

I do agree that the open balance and the reports are ok, but looking at the individual accounts is where the error appears.

Many thanks

Selina

Hello again, @Selina.

I appreciate your input from every angle. 

As mentioned by my colleagues above, the positive amount showing is a debit on your account while the negative is the credit. Also, the amount showing on your account depends on how it is created. 

To isolate the issue, you can pull up the transaction journal to verify the posting of the transaction as to why it's showing as negative. 

Moreover, when creating a deposit, the amount will offset the open balance on the suppliers page. 

You can also check out these articles which you may find helpful :

• How do I handle supplier credits and refunds? 
• Supplier Refunds - How To (video)

If you need anything else, leave a comment below. I'm always right here to help. Take care.

Thanks for your reply, I understand what you are saying, and I am posting in exactly the way advised by QB.

By your theory, Bill is a Debit (positive), Bill Payment is a credit (negative).  All fine. 

A Supplier Credit is also a credit (negative), and therefore, a refund of cash, the opposite to the bill payment is a debit (positive).  However, this is shown as a negative value, meaning the transaction total at the bottom should be zero - at the moment, it doubles the value of the supplier credit because the refund doesn't cancel it out.  It should cancel out a credit in the way a bill payment cancels out a bill.     

This is how the open balance and the nominal reports are also calculating it, which is correct, the issue is simply with the sign used in the supplier account itself - which is simply a memo account to the actual nominal accounts.  I'm not sure how else to explain this to make QB understand that it's incorrect.  

Put simply, if a bill payment is a credit, shown as a negative, then a refund should be a debit, shown as a positive - money out vs money in.  But that's not what happens - both bill payments and refunds (deposits) are shown as negative.  

If this is an issue with the coding behind the use of the 'Deposit' transaction type, maybe QB should develop a 'Supplier Refund' transaction type to fix the error.  You could also create a 'Customer Refund' for symmetry across the ledgers as this also isn't an available option as it is in most other accounting software packages?

I really do appreciate your response, but this is something which needs to be fixed.

Many thanks

Selina

Hiya Selina :waving_hand:, You can leave feedback regarding this. But you are correct it should balance out as such but it never has, as previously advised this does not affect anything. I will also be leaving feedback fo the product engineers too and hopefully, this will be something that they resolve. Regards 

Thanks Becky, how do I send feedback?  Appreciate you also sending feedback.

Many thanks, Selina

Sending feedback only takes a few steps, Selina.

On your QuickBooks Online account, click on the Gear icon. Under PROFILE, select Feedback.

Enter your feedback on the Share your feedback box, then click Next.

Your valuable feedback goes to our Product Development team to help improve your experience in QBO.

This is incredibly confusing and surely is not how it should work. Before I saw your contribution, I must have wasted several hours on the issue including over an hour on live chat. It is totally ridiculous that Bill Payments and Deposits (refunds) should be shown with the same sign. I frequently use the export facility to put transactions into a spreadsheet and this is totally thrown by this illogicality. The accounting entries for a Bill Payment are Dr Creditor account and Cr Bank account. The accounting entries for a refund are Dr Bank Account and Cr Creditor account. This surely means that Bill payments should show as negative (which they do) and Refunds should show as positive (which they do not) in the supplier account. After all, that is how they show in the bank account and, if you look at the transactions, that is how they are stored.

It may not affect the reporting but it does means that the results of exporting to Excel (for example) are nonsense.

Are you aware that all of the links in this thread lead to "Message not found"?

Hello Ihatonlineqweek, thanks for letting us know we have passed this on.