Thank you for routing to the developers. It's shocking - frankly - that such a basic thing is not in play.
Here's some more about the situation and why this is a problem. Maybe it will help the developers with their prioritization.
In my case we issue invoices weekly. The client(s) can pay them anytime in NET30 terms, and may or may not pay single; meaning, you could have an invoice Week 1 that's $5k and an invoice Week 2 that's $10k; the client might issue a single payment for $15k - in fact this happens more than it doesn't. So I have no way to enter a single payment to two invoices because there's only one field. There are no checks so I can't enter them that way, either. So we code it paid because we see it came into the account.
I can't use account auto reconcile when this happens because QuickBooks has no way of knowing which invoice(s) got paid if the amounts are recurrent ($15k, then another $15k across four invoices). It can see there's a payment if I create a rule against the memo, but it doesn't WHAT got paid. So I'm still having to mark the payment.
The reason we issue weekly instead of otherwise is that many clients only process invoices on a fixed schedule. They don't just pay it because it arrived. They pay it during their scheduled processing window and require that we submit the invoice at least a week prior to that window to give them time to enter it into AP. Additionally, if they're waiting on something else - like approval from another party - they may not pay it during the schedule, either. Still within NET30 but not with the cadence that QuickBooks is assuming.
In a "perfect world", you would have a function that enables something like this:
- I create a client
- For that client I create a project
- For that project I create a payment agreement (weekly/biweekly/monthly/quarterly/adhoc or custom) and duration (1 month, 3, months, 6 months, 1 year, adhoc or custom)
- The payment agreement has a dollar amount I expect to get paid with a frequency (hourly/flat/adhoc or custom) and a total calculated accordingly
- The payment agreement is associated to a deposit account (which is tied to the Banking area).
- Based on the cadence specified in the payment agreement, QuickBooks analyzes the specified deposit account and looks for transactions (whether Direct Deposit, Wire Transfer, ACH, check deposit or otherwise) that match the amount specified in the agreement within a time period based on a previous payment (i.e. this payment came in at the end of Week X, I see two invoices generated very recently before Week X, they're likely associated) and flags for review
- I go in and accept, based on the rule, that the one(s) it found correlate to the payment agreement and I determine if there should be an auto-rule or not
- QuickBooks takes my spec and automagically (A) creates a payment record, (B) marks the invoice as paid, and (C) updates Sales reporting (they are sales of "billable activities", not tangible items).
In a perfect world. But no tool I can think of does this for some bizarre reason despite it really being that simple. Because that's what I'm doing as a human.
I'm almost at the point of building such a flow in an ECM platform because I know I can, but I don't feel like I should have to do that.
Zoho doesn't do it either, but at least when I mark the invoice paid, it automagically creates the payment record for me.
Neither Zoho or QuickBooks allow me to bulk pay invoices in this manner - just select all of them and mark them paid, or give me a grid to mass edit easier (I can do this in SharePoint, but it's not the right tool for the job). You're talking 3-4 clicks PER invoice which is a waste of a human's time. But since Zoho is the current invoicing tool, bulk pay is not a requirement. At most it's two invoices which is manageable.
To @Fiat Lux - ASIA : this is basic functionality. It should not require third party tools.
