Customer Down Payments (Deposits/Unearned Revenue)

How To
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Suggested future enhancement: Back end seamless accounting to track deposits as unearned revenue until bill of sale is officially completed with out journal entries and separate manual tracking reports as outlined below.

Here’s my current workflow for recording customer deposits on undelivered projects/builds…
–Record Payment to Customer Account, but don’t apply (approved quote isn’t invoiced anyway)–this is for an audit trail in Striven
–Create a GL Other Current Liability Account as a subaccount under “Unearned Revenue” with the name of the customer
–Create a Journal Entry adjusting the payment out of the customer A/R record and int the newly created Unearned Revenue account w/the customer name

Once product/build/service is delivered and invoiced…
–Create a reversing JE back to A/R for the customer
–Apply JE in Customer A/R to open the invoice.

I also created a customized report to track Unearned Revenue so as a company we will easily reconcile customer balances, but also have a reference on how much cash we’re liable for to our customers regarding committed sales.

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We have a deposit item called “Deposit2020” and “Depositapplied”

Deposit2020 - is a fixed assed that goes to a special GL Account that is a other current liability.
Depositapplied - is a discount - same GL Accounts

We add each line items to all contract managed quotes.
We use progressive billing template

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It automatically sends the deposit invoice on approval.
Once the job is marked complete it automatically send the balance invoice minus the deposit.

We don’t have to do anything with journal entries and will show billed 100 percent on the quote.

Only hiccup is when the quote changes. We have a work around for this but that is the only snag.
I run a report for DEPOSIT2020 and it shows me when the deposit is paid from the report.
I then have a report that I go back through and make sure they zero each other out.

We should brainstorm a future feature to make deposits more seamless without causing issues to other aspects of the project.

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