I have looked online and have done some trial and error on this question without positive results, so I am hoping that you might be able to shed some light on this subject and how we might address these situations.
Background:
The controller who was in responsible charge of the accounting operations here prior to my arrival did not take the time to invoice for customer deposits or set up invoices for customers who hold back retainage as a routine part of the contractual arrangement. The result of that approach has produced AR reports that contain very old “receivables” that are not old receivables and or prior period invoices that were ignored because they were for a work effort that was not going to take place for a year or more. We do NOT want to delete or void these incorrect invoices from last year since the tax returns and financial statements for that closed period have been completed.
Goal/Objective:
Ideally, we would like to “re-issue” some of these invoices that were published, delivered, and accounted for last year. If I were doing things by hand, I would void, credit the invoice in the current period and re-issue it for a net zero transaction. The revised invoices would allocate the charge to Customer Deposits, Retainage or perhaps Accounts Receivable depending upon the case.
We’ve experimented by attempting to:
- run an exact inverse of the subject invoices,
- override the date of an invoice being voided to today’s date versus the default on that invoice from the prior closed period.
QuickBooks does not appear to allow you to void or reverse a prior closed period invoice in the current period, and the experimental tactics listed above either prompted us to unlock the prior period, (which we do NOT want to do), or did not reset the percentages of prior invoices so that a current progress invoice calculates the prior, current and total invoice amounts correctly.
Ask:
I would think that post period corrections like this would be a common thing to need to do and that there would be very clear and specific methodologies to accomplish them without impacting the balances and figures of post periods. I noted a YouTube lesson where they described how to do something like this for prior year uncleared bank transactions from prior closed periods, but not for invoices.
Would you know of a “best practice” process to handle these sort of situations?
