Hi, our clients wish to record the following accounting behaviour and I cannot see how to do it through the API:

• Several invoices are sent at different times
• One payment is made by a customer, often exceeding the total of the invoices
• Selected invoices are matched against the one large payment
• The remainder of the payment is refunded to the customer

I believe you can do this through the web, but I do not believe it is possible through the API. Am I correct?

I had thought that I could break the large payment up into smaller payments, allowing each one to be matched against a single invoice. However this would not reflect the real situation and would (I think) make it hard to reconcile with bank statements.

Thanks,
Stephen Boissiere

Hi Stephen,

The best way to force the matching you want would in fact be to create multiple debtor payments.

In order to facilitate easier bank reconciliation, what you should do is create a number of DebtorPayment entries:

- For each 'individual' payment, do NOT specify a contra account - only debtor, invoice number, amount/amount-default-currency, etc.
- For the total amount, ONLY specify the contra account, and NOT the debtor
- Text, date, voucher number should of course be identical for all entries
- For actual payments, all of these entries would typically be NEGATIVE (the total entry on the bank account is as contra account, and thus, will end up positive on the bank account)

This way, you'll get individual entries on the customer(s) for each invoice - yet only one on the bank side.


Best regards,

Thanks Christian for your prompt reply, that sounds like a very workable solution.