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!
Hi Max
Thanks for suggesting a solution but unfortunately this doesn’t resolve the issue for me as payments from Breww come into Xero as reconciled thus do not appear in the ‘Match’ column in the bank reconciliation.
I therefore have to find the payment which in our case has been set to go into ‘prepayments’ in Xero, ‘remove & redo’ and only then can I match it to incoming funds in the bank reconciliation.
This is having an impact on our business. It wastes time finding and unreconciling every transaction before I can reconcile it with the incoming funds AND it is putting our business at risk as I have no way of knowing that an invoice remains unpaid in the event of failure to receive funds from the card processing company (Incoming funds generally take 2-3 days to hit our account from the credit card processing company). It is the incoming funds that tell me to find the invoice when it should be the other way round.
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Hi Liz - thanks for the message!
My understanding is that unreconciled payments (like the ones Breww creates in Xero if you’ve added a payment manually in Breww) do appear in the ‘Match’ option in Xero’s reconciliation tool (just like unpaid invoices do) - so there shouldn’t be any need to find them to remove and redo these payments in Xero before reconciling them. This is what appears to happen in our demo account in my testing, and I’ve come across a couple of community articles on Xero here and here that seem to confirm it.
Regarding knowing whether an invoice is actually unpaid in the event the funds aren’t received, you should be able to use the “Bank Reconciliation Summary” in Xero to see all unreconciled payments (there’s a screenshot in my guide above). That should highlight the payments in Xero that were manually created but don’t have an equivalent bank statement reconciled against them and mean that you’re not reliant on incoming funds to highlight unpaid invoices.
However, reading through your problem again, I think this solution might be a bit overkill! It sounds like a feature allowing you to configure Breww to download payments from Xero but prevent uploading payments from Breww (rather than having to have either both or neither, which is the case currently) would resolve this for you. That way, when you manually mark an invoice as paid in Breww because you are expecting a payment rather than having actually received the funds, Breww won’t mark the invoice as paid in Xero. Then, the invoice will remain unpaid in Xero until it’s reconciled against the incoming funds a few days later, meaning you can see the unpaid amounts without using the “Bank Reconciliation Summary” report.
If that sounds like a better solution for your use case, please let us know, and we’ll see what we can do!
Hi Max
The payments recorded in Breww are not unreconciled in Xero, so they are not appearing in the ‘Match’ option or the reconciliation report in Xero, that’s my problem.
Preventing Breww from marking invoices as paid in Xero sounds like a good solution. Can you help us put that in place please?
Liz
Ah, apologies, I misread your message regarding the reconciliation status of those payments in Xero! I see, so they are reconciled and, therefore, don’t appear in the “Match” section. That makes sense.
Yes, absolutely. We’ve been discussing this on our side, and we thought an even better solution would be to allow you to set the “Status” of the payment when adding it to one of Breww’s existing payment statuses of “Pending” or “Processing” (which are used to indicate the payment is not yet complete). Payments with these statuses aren’t uploaded to Xero, as they could still fail at this point (e.g. a direct debit payment). You would then be able to add a payment but set its status to “Processing,” which would prevent it from being uploaded to Xero, so the unpaid invoice would be ready to be reconciled in Xero when the funds appeared.
Allowing you to choose the payment status should be straightforward for us, so we’ll see what we can do!
That’s great, thank you! It will save me a LOT of time 
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Hi Liz - great news! This turned out to be a very quick feature to add, so we’ve been able to fit it in between our other tasks 
You can now add a Pending or Processing payment to an invoice. When adding the payment, simply click Show additional options at the bottom:
And then set the Status to Pending or Processing.
The payment then won’t be uploaded to Xero, keeping the invoice unpaid and making it easy to reconcile.
I hope that helps, but please let us know if you have any issues 
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Thank you, that’s great! One last thing, is it possible to make the new feature the default on our online webshop integration with MTC? They all come in automatically as paid and reconciled. If they could default to processing that would make me happy!
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No problem at all! You can actually achieve this is already by going to Integrations → Ecommerce & POS → mtc Config → Set the Would you like imported payments to be uploaded to your accountancy provider? setting to No, don’t upload imported payments into my accountancy provider.
That will then prevent any new payments for mtc orders from being uploaded