How do I enter prepayments from customers?

Generally, you invoice your customers before they pay you. In this case, you would create a sale transaction in Easy Books. Then later when you receive payment, you assign one or more payments to the sale. This allows Easy Books to link all the payments with the original sale. You can then navigate from sale to the payments and back to the sale.

But if you receive money from your customer before you create their invoice, you can still enter the information, but the process is a little different because you're not linking a payment to a sale.

• Suppose your customer pays you £1,000 up front. 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 which way the money is moving.

Afterwards you will notice the customer account shows a negative balance. This is because in the absence of a sale, you owe your customer the money back. The app shows the amount owed to you by your customer.

• When you create an invoice for your customer, add a sale by going to the customer's account, then tap the "Add a new sale" line. Check the Transaction Type is set to "Sale". 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.

After saving the transaction you should see the customer balance has increased (is less negative).

• 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).