Why do sales receipts that are UNPAID show as PAID?

Thanks for visiting the Community, @WestHillsWeb.

In QuickBooks Online (QBO), a sales receipt is used when your customer pays you on the spot for goods or services. This is the reason why they're showing as paid. The option to pull up a report that shows unpaid sales receipt is currently unavailable.

However, based on the information you've shared above, I highly suggest creating an invoice instead. This is used when your customer agrees to pay you later. You can set up terms to indicate how long the customer has to pay. They won't show as paid unless you applied a payment using the Receive Payment option.

You can check out this article for more information about the difference between the two transactions: What is the difference between an invoice and a sales receipt.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any additional questions or concerns. I'm more than willing to help. Happy holidays!

WestHillsWeb,

So, you are NOT crazy. I am certain that many thousands of businesses have the exact same issue as you. We are one of them. I too do not appreciate robotic answers from well-meaning people. This is a situation where someone that wants to put an "engineer" cap on can too easily just talk past you and it can be very frustrating.

Yes, some engineer/developer set it up to where the ONLY way you can automatically accept recurring payments from a customer is to create a recurring sales receipt. If ANYTHING prevents this payment from being received, it will still mark it as paid. In may case many times, even though I am so thorough and could swear that it was checked, I too have found more than one invoice that was not checked. I remember one particular customer was going to cancel service on account of the bill that they thought was already paid. I should have fired this customer, but decided that I just needed to snap out of the emotion of it and realize that it would be more profitable to just concede this one.

It appears that no one is interested in actually solving this issue. They instead will blindly deny that this is an issue at all and that you need to create invoices instead, etc.

It is an obvious issue/oversight/bug that there is not any sort of alert, marking or safeguard to prevent a sales receipt with no or a failed payment from being marked as paid. If you could collect automatic recurring payments using an invoice where you could set it and forget it with no required interaction with the customer, that would be ok too. As far as I can tell, that is not an option. 

Good luck! Please let me know if you get anywhere.

Chris

Was this ever resolved?  I wonder how many other businesses this is happening to but don't know it YET!  We just made the discovery this has happened to our business.  There are over 12 months of recurring transactions for one customer, 9 months on another customer and 2 months on another customer which we haven't been paid for. QBs sent a sales receipt each month (declaring the that the transaction was paid) but none of the transactions made it over to Intuit.  Money owed that never made it to our bank.  The customers all believe they paid as they were sent receipts.  Mind boggling.  There is definitely a bug in this system.  The check boxes are somehow being auto unchecked by QBs software.  There is no other way to explain how one customer's transactions went through Intuit and into our bank for three months and then suddenly stopped. This is a lot of missing money.  How does one go back to a customer after a year went by and tell them they owe for the entire year? 

I have never once replied to the literal thousands of posts I've found in QB Support but I felt compelled to here due to the sheer frustration so many of you are experiencing. I can surely relate to the annoyances felt by all of you when you get stock responses by agents just trying to beef up their post count and not actually making an effort to even understand the situation much less provide actual help. 

Anyway! I wanted to say that I am a general manager for a firm who provides bookkeeping and accounting services to business across the country and I deal with this issue with so many of my clients. Two practical solutions to the system Intuit has designed are as follows:

1. If you choose to use sales receipts, I understand this is the preferred method of billing because you as the business owner have control over setting up those recurring payments so this option is most attractive. Card in hand, bill it, get the money! That being said, we end up with this exact problem and the only way to work around this is to check the report manually every month to ensure you've received the deposits you should have against your merchant account charges. 

2. You do have the option to set up recurring invoices. If you enable online payments in your invoice, you can then direct your customer to set up auto pay from the initial invoice. There are some sales concepts at play here which make this a less attractive option of course from the perspective of customer retention but it also makes the unpaid invoices factor much easier to detect than the sales receipt option. There's a video here which explains this: 

I wanted to specifically address the person who was saying that invoices are showing up as paid even though they haven't been. This issue is likely due to payments being received into undeposited funds erroneously or difficulties matching transactions in the bank feed correctly. These are both very common issues and I would suggest watching some videos found from the search terms: "undeposited funds" and "matching from the bank feed in QBO."

Finally, for the problem at hand when you know you have a sales receipt that's showing paid but hasn't been paid, the fix for this is to delete the sales receipt and recreate this as an invoice. If the amount is collectible, the amount lives in your AR as an asset until you receive the payment against your invoice. If the amount is uncollectable, you should create a credit memo (not vendor credit) for the amount of the invoice and categorize that amount to an expense account called "bad debt." Then go to "receive payment" and receive payment against that invoice with the credit memo you've created. This will remove the balance from AR and show the amount is a bad debt that is writing off the uncollectable amount. You can find more information about this if you search "how to write off an invoice in QuickBooks online."

Quickbooks is an incredibly user friendly program that takes sometimes complicated accounting principles and makes them effortless for the lay person to execute. This also has the effect of instilling a false sense of security when it comes to understanding of those principles and that's how we end up with lots of frustration and really messy books. I see this kind of think every day and it's unfortunate that the support professionals here aren't more tuned in to those circumstances. 

I hope I've provided some help! Good luck! 

This is a bug that bites my companies bottom line. I found a way to see which sales were not paid. 

go to your QB merchant services account. Search all your sales transaction for the last year it will only go back a year. Then export all the data to a spreadsheet. The transactions that are credit card sales that say "paid" have not been processed. The ones that went through say paid_payment_success. Good luck this happens to us when we don't close out the sales transaction with the process payment box checked 

Every single month I have at least 2-3 tenants where their invoices reflect as “paid” but they assure me they have not actually made the payment yet!!?? They can’t pay the invoice if it’s already saying “paid” it is a huge tax nightmare when I am deleting payments and redoing invoices. I cannot stand quickbooks, it’s been a year and this continues on!!!! Plus the embarrassment as a landlord I go through trying to explain this to my tenants m.  I don’t have time to switch companies but I can’t wait to say goodbye to Quickbooks!!

Probably not the correct thing to do, but here goes:

I went through all of my customers and found where payments were applied giving a zero balance, yet they still showed that the charges failed (it was in red). And no, turning off Automation does not keep this from happening. I supposed I could have gone through my Merchant Services account to see what showed as "failed" each month instead of funded. But I have less than 50 customers. 

One Customer issue is Mr. Smith

Mr. Smith had 3 SALES RECEIPTS that were not actually funded but showed paid in Mr. Smith's Customer Account in QBO. 

#300  $150  12/10/2021

#313  $150   1/10/2021

#340  $150   2/10/2021

The total Amount here is $450 that I didn't receive. 

1. I created an Invoice using the same Product that was on the Sales Receipt, using the Invoice number, date, etc. in the Description so I can reference it later if I need to. 

Customers don't care if it's an Invoice or Sales Receipt and they aren't my Customers anymore anyway because they didn't pay.

2. I created a Credit Memo for Customer Mr. Smith 

I used a different line for each non-paid Sales Receipt so that I would have the date of service and invoice number separated for reference later in case this was the wrong thing to do.

I used the Date of Service for the failed payment Sales Receipt.

I created and product/service item called "Bad Debt - Sales Receipts that weren't paid by customers" as the description. I used the Sales Receipt number in the description.

My thought here is that I can Then I can make a report for this product later. But who really knows? 

The total Credit Memo was for $450, which is the total of the unpaid Failed Sales Receipts for Mr. Smith. 

3. Here's a tricky part that I got stuck on and decided to just create the Invoice. I couldn't accept the Credit Memo as payment for Mr. Smith's Sales Receipts. So, I went to his account and edited his chosen form of payment (a credit card because it was a reoccurring transaction-the whole reason most of us use Sales Receitps, to begin with! I changed it to Cash. Otherwise, the system keeps wanted you to process the transaction again as the only option. 

4. I opened the Invoice, and clicked on "Receive Payment."

And ya know what? Good Ol' QB already had the Credit Memo listed as the form of payment that they wanted to automatically apply to the Invoice. 

I deleted the unpaid Sales Receipts because I was tired of looking at them glaring at me in red. 

My goal was to have a trackable item of Bad Debt. I'm terrible at this, so there's probably a much better way to account for it rather than just a Product/Service called Bad Debt. My CPA can help move that or at the least have the totals. 

Just checking in to say that almost 3 years later, the same issue is also happening for us.