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Balance forward that shouldn't exist shows on customer statement

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
December 11, 2018
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I'm keeping the books for a friend's in-home daycare company in QB 2016 Pro Desktop. I create a new invoice for each customer at the beginning of each year. For one customer, the 2016 invoice shows no balance due. However, the customer balance detail report shows her with a $166 balance at the end of 2016, and a customer statement for the current fiscal year shows a $166 balance forward dated 12/31/2016. This appears to contradict the $0 balance due on last year's invoice.

Additionally, I recollect that the customer did have a $166 balance due at the end of last year and that I wrote it off to a "bad debt" account, but there is no corresponding entry in "bad debt." I'd appreciate any help finding where that $166 is hiding in the company accounts.

Thank you,

Terry

QuickBooks Desktop

Best answer by lynda11_2

It sounds like you may not have applied that transaction for bad debt to the open balance. So even though the account overall has a zero balance it's not applied so it showing in the statements. You need to go to receive customer payment and apply that credit that's hanging to clear it.

lynda11_2Answer

It sounds like you may not have applied that transaction for bad debt to the open balance. So even though the account overall has a zero balance it's not applied so it showing in the statements. You need to go to receive customer payment and apply that credit that's hanging to clear it.

T

tmorseAuthor

Thank you for responding. I may be looking for it in the wrong place, but I haven't been able to locate any unapplied payments for $166 that could be assigned to the bad debt account. I can enter a payment to the customer's account dated 12/31/2016 and that eliminates the 2017 opening balance. However, the customer didn't actually make that payment, so this seems like sweeping the problem under the rug.

I went back to the customer's 2016 invoice and reentered the $166 charge (it had changed to zero when I transferred it to bad debt, although it doesn't show up in the bad debt account now), with the idea that this would then create an amount due of $166, which I could transfer to the bad debt account. However, the account shows an available credit of $144 that shouldn't exist, so QB won't let me transfer the $166 to bad debt without first applying the available credit. Checking the other customer accounts, almost all of them show available credits that shouldn't exist. Any idea what might be causing this? Clearly, there's a lot I don't grasp about how QB operates (my previous experience was with GnuCash).

Thank you,
Terry

lynda11_2

Run an open balance report on your customer so you can see what shows as open.

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