It would be really handy to be able to reverse a cleared check from the system and here is why.
In this day and age 99% of transactions are paid electronically and not by check.
So on 01-04-10 you pay 50 suppliers from accounts payable for a total of $25000, accpac presents them all as separate checks and the bank treats it as one number but that's a separate issue altogether.
Your bank accepts the payment batch and takes the money out of your account.
So on the 01-04-10 you have a number of checks withdrawn for $25000 which is the sum of your payment batch. You clear and post this reconciliation because everything matches and you move forward.
One of these entries say for $450 for one supplier had an invalid account on it (the file passed the first round of checking by your bank to make sure that the valid bank and branch were on the file), or it was closed, or had the wrong suffix etc. Generally these float around for 2 or 3 days and then get returned to your bank electronically, in the case of this example lets say that it is returned on 04/04/2010. You can't reverse the check because it has already been paid.
You need to regenerate a payment to the supplier somehow, generate them a check and post it to them, or find out their bank account details and resubmit a payment. At this point it all starts to become a bit difficult and clients make a right hash of things. Kind of what life used to be like before we could create refund transactions in A/R.
FYI you have been able to do this in Peresoft Cashbook for at least the last 11 years!
by: Kerry J. | over a year ago | Financial Management
Comments
Also useful if a payment has been miskeyed - either to the wrong vendor, or as a misc payment when it should have been a vendor payment, etc.
However a check has been originally posted, even with an unapplied amount hanging, the bounced check should be reversable. Not this error, cannot be reversed due to unapplied payment.
The problem I have is credit card charges charged in one month and credited in another. If I have to reconcile the statement, I have to clear the payment. If it is refunded on the next statement doing a debit note to clear it does not show up in the reconciliation. So 2 entries must be done - one in AP and another washout in the reconciliation.
Both A/P and Payroll EFT modules could use a redesign here. Payroll security issues tie in too. You can't have an EFT batch of 50 payments going into BK as separate entries, yet you want to be able to reverse one of those entries. We need a whole different EFT-handling layer.
is anybody at Sage checking these? this is a VERY common scenario when things bounce back and this feature should have been fixed already!!!
Not sure why you are not supposed to reverse cleared payments. You will only know your payments to vendors bounced back days after making the actual payments. If reconciliation is done daily, the check payment would have been cleared for sure.
Personally I believe this is a much needed redesign.