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Prepayments

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Clive Copeland

05 Dec, 2014 07:13 PM

Hi.
Just started withEasy Books after paying for the full version, and I'm looking forward to making my life as a driving instructor easier.
I'm trying to set it up correctly and I'm getting confusedin how to set it up correctly to suit my cash based life.
Some of my pupils pay in advance and then as the lessons are taken the balance in the kitty gets reduced.
How can I perform this in Easy Books?
I've set up some customers with their opening balance eg £230. They take a driving lesson and i create a sales invoice for 2 hours worth of service fees, but the balance in their kitty goes up rather than down. How can I get the balance to go down rather than up?
I'd appreciate if you can help, ideally in a non-accountants speak for someone who gets baffled easily.
Many thanks
Clive

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Admin on 06 Dec, 2014 02:07 PM

   

   Hi Clive,

   I know of a few people who use the app for their taxi company, so I assume it could be similar if not a little easier for you. If you set up each student as a customer you could use the app to email them a copy of the invoice. But it might be better if you're working on pre-payments to do this instead:

   1. The customer pre-pays for X lessons, say £200. Create the customer account if it isn't already, then add a transaction from your bank account (or petty cash account) to the customer. It's easiest to do this from the bank account side because the Transaction Type then shows either "In (Received)" or "Out (paid)" which makes it quite clear I think.
      
   2. When you complete a lesson, add a sale by going to the customer's account, then tap the "Add a new sale" line. Set the Transaction Type to "Sale" if it isn't already. You may have to choose the income account (or product - see later). After a few entries the app will guess and start to fill this in for you. You can manually mark the sale paid if you want to (you don't have to, all you're doing is adding a tick to the list of sales).

   These two steps both affect the amount the customer owes you. Remember that if the balance shown on the customer account is negative this means you owe them instead. This will happen after step 1 because you received money ahead of the sale(s). By what you said in your message I think you might have entered the opening balance the wrong way round.

   You shouldn't need to add opening balances, and in fact this can upset your accounts if you want to use Easy Books as your accounts package. You can of course ignore this if you only intend to use Easy Books for invoicing. The full power really comes from entering everything though, including your business costs. This can then give you a good feel for how things are going at all times, using the reports Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Best Customers so on. Any errors in your opening balances will be shown on the Trial Balance report - see https://easybooksapp.com/user-guide/ios/report/trial-balance.

   All the best,
   Mathew

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2. Admin closed this discussion on 08 Mar, 2015 11:17 AM.