This is a real pain in the neck now. Emerald allows you to create manual
invoices with negative amounts (credits), but Emerald NO LONGER allows you
to make a payment with a negative amount. That's the annoying part.
Anytime we issue a refund for whatever reason, I create an invoice for some
negative amount, but when I pay that invoice, I have to get rid of the
negative (since Emerald no longer allows you to enter in negative payments),
THEN I have to go into Query Analyzer (ISQL/w) and run:
update payments
set amount=0-amount where paymentid=12345
....changing the paymentid to whatever it really is. Afterward, I sometimes
have to mess around with the MBR balance and dates (expire, paidthru, etc.)
Why do we do all of this?
Since Emerald is the link between us and the customer as far as billing is
concerned, we have to have a record of money coming in as well as going out.
That's why there needs to be payments associated with whatever money is
being exchanged--and that includes refunds/credits. Since money coming in
is shown as positive values in Payments, money going out would be negative.
A negative invoice without a negative payment for money that really was sent
back to the customer screws up our accounting information. If no negative
payment is entered into Emerald, yet a negative invoice was created, it
looks as if we never issued the credit eventhough we really did.
If Emerald would allow negative payments to be entered in, it'd make life a
lot easier. In older versions of Emerald (don't remember when it was
disabled), you couldn't enter in a payment as "-12.34", but you could as
"(12.34)". Now, neither work.
Josh
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