How do I handle overpayments from customers?

Sometimes, a customer might pay more than what is due for an invoice. This article will present to you the best options for what to do in a situation like this.

In various situations a customer may accidentally or purposely overpay for an order. Some companies may be tempted to write off overpayments using journal entries in QuickBooks, but this is NOT the best solution as the QuickBooks SDK does not support sending that link to Acctivate, so you may have a discrepancies in your balances between the two systems.

Instead, you should consider either of the two following options:

• Create a credit in QuickBooks for the customer to use later down the line. 
  • This is the best option when a customer will be ordering from you again later down the line, or if the customer has another invoice to pay out.
• Create a refund to give the excess balance back to the customer.
  • This is the best option when a customer makes a one time purchase, or if the customer would like their excess payment returned.

If you'd like to create a credit for the customer to use later down the line, take the following steps:

1. In QuickBooks, open the customer payment in which the overpayment occurred.
2. Select the option "Leave the credit to be used later."
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3. Click "Save & Close" to finish creating the credit to use for the customer later down the line.
4. If desired, use the credit to apply to other open invoices, or if there are no other open invoices, perform a synchronization with QuickBooks within Acctivate to push this credit to Acctivate.
5. When you're ready you can now apply the credit to a invoice later down the line in Acctivate. If you'd like to know how to do that, please check out this article.

If you'd like to refund the excess balance back to the customer, take the following steps:

1. In QuickBooks, open the customer payment in which the overpayment occurred.
2. Select the option "Refund the amount to the customer"
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3. Click "Save & Close" and then follow the prompts in QuickBooks to create the credit; assigning account, method of refund, and a memo if desired. You may also set a "class" if desired, but not required.
4. Perform a synchronization with QuickBooks in Acctivate to sync over the refund back to the customer.
   
   

It is important that you do not handle overpayments as write off's as Acctivate has no way of obtaining that information. This results in discrepancies between Acctivate and QuickBooks.