FAQ #: 8
A customer overpaid their account, how do I handle this?

Once you have applied payments to all the invoices on a customer's account and they have money remaining, you can leave the remaining amount as an "unapplied" payment.

There are a couple of different ways to handle an overpayment, depending on whether you wish to leave this as a credit on the customer's account that they can use later to pay other invoices, or if you simply wish to "write-off" the amount and not leave it as credit for them to use later. Generally, if it is a few cents, users typically write these amounts off, but larger amounts you may wish to leave as "Unapplied Credit" that you can use later to pay on other invoices.

If you wish to write the amount off and not leave credit on the customer's account, click on the "Overpaid" button at the bottom on the screen. A window will be displayed with the "Write Off as Overpayment" option selected. You will be prompted for a "reference" number. You can choose to enter your own number, or to click on "Assign #" and have a system generated reference number assigned. Once you click on Apply, the amount will be posted to your Cash Posting Adjustments Account.

If you wish to leave the amount as an Unapplied Credit that the customer can use at a later time to apply to other invoices, click on the "Unapplied" button at the bottom of the screen. A window will be display with the "Leave as Unapplied Payment" option selected. You will need to enter a "reference" number, or click on "Assign #" to have a system generated reference number assigned. Once you click on Apply, the amount will show on the customer's account as a credit memo.

The window display by both the "Unapplied" and "Overpaid" button is the same window, with different options selected. You can change your selection in this window as desired. When using the "Overpaid" option, and the amount is being written off, you need to be sure the Cash Posting Adjustments Account has been configured in the Application Interface Maintenance. This lets Answers knows where to post the write-off amounts.

You can choose to leave the credit and apply it at some later time when the customer has other invoices to pay. If the customer has a credit balance, they will not be sent a credit statement unless you request that credit statements be printed (during the statement printing). If the amount is a small amount and you wish to "write-off" the amount from their account so that they do not have a credit on their account, you can use Cash Posting and the Reversing Entries Mode to write-off the credit. To do this, please see Procedure for Writing Off A Customer Credit.