We take most of our payments in advance of delivery, either by card or bank transfer. To indicate to staff making a delivery or handing over a click and collect order that it is paid we add a payment to the Breww order. When it comes across to Xero it is already marked as reconciled so when I get the money through the bank account there is nothing to pay. I am currently going to the prepayment as received from Breww and selecting ‘remove & redo’ so that the payment can be allocated to the invoice or credit. There most be a way of sorting this but I haven’t found it, can anyone help?
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Hi Liz,
I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you. This is a really great question! Currently, the method you described is pretty much the only way to handle this situation, which we do understand is far from ideal. There is a great feature request for the ability to Allow importing customer overpayments from accounting software to Breww, which we think would be a great feature and would solve this problem for you. We have explored the idea, but building it is a substantial and complex project, which in itself is not problematic. The challenge we face is that it hasn’t gained a lot of traction within the community yet, which makes it difficult for us to prioritise it as a top project. If you could add your vote to this feature request, that would definitely help move it up the list.
If you have any questions at all, please let me know!
How do I edit my post? I shall change it to PLEASE FORWARD TO ALL BOOK KEEPERS AND ACCOUNTS PEOPLE TO VOTE 
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Hi Liz,
I’m having the same problem as you’re facing.
Connor, the feature request seems appropriate but that will still have issues. For example, the customer might pay today via card payment but the payment might not land in our account for 3 working days, therefore Xero won’t have any overpayments to allocate back into Breww, but we’ll still want to mark the invoice in Breww as paid (so the orders team can confirm the order and arrange delivery to the customer). Do you see what I mean?
In an ideal world (for me anyway), I’d like Xero to push through live customer balances into Breww. I don’t necessarily need payments to push through from Xero to Breww, as long as the customer balances are always correct / live.
What I don’t want, is any payments to be pushed through from Breww into Xero, otherwise I have to do what Liz does and “remove & redo” the transaction, which is just doubling up admin time for our bookkeeper.
Thanks,
Shaun
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Hi Shaun - thanks for adding your example here; that’s really useful.
In this scenario, I think the following workflow is a way to get around the fact both Xero and Breww need the invoice to be marked as paid in order to update the customer’s balance whilst still allowing you to reconcile the payment later:
- Customer pays for an invoice via card payment, and the invoice is manually marked as paid in Breww before it can be reconciled in Xero in order not to exceed their credit limit.
- Breww uploads this payment, marking the invoice as paid in Xero.
- The funds arrive in the bank account a few days later and appear in the Xero bank reconciliation. Here, Xero allows you to reconcile a bank transaction against a payment (rather than only being able to reconcile them against an unpaid invoice):
- The payment is then reconciled in Xero, confirming that the money did indeed arrive:
It would also be possible for this flow to begin in Xero, where you could manually mark the invoice as paid, and Breww would shortly afterwards download the payment into Breww.
You would also be able to use the Bank reconciliation report in Xero to see whether there are any manually created payments that haven’t been reconciled to a bank transaction to catch scenarios where the money never actually arrived:
Let us know your thoughts!