Customer's Accounts Receivable is Incorrect

by Dana
(Long Island, New York, USA)

One of my customer's accounts receivable is incorrect.

I'm using QuickBooks Pro 2008. Within the Receive Payments window, the customer information shows five invoices totaling $27,457.39 and available credits of $10,345.07 for my customer. This makes the balance $17,112.32.

This information is totally incorrect. However, the Customer Balance Detail report, Customer Balance Summary and the Open Invoice report are accurate and reflect each of the customer's transactions and the correct balance of $16,833.58. I also looked in Accounts Receivable and it relects the correct payments received from this customer.

How do I correct the erroneous information contained in the Receive Payments area and avoid changes to all my other reports? The available credits must be removed as they don't exist.

I have not applied two recent payments to this customer's account fearing I will only make a bad situation worse.

What a mess! Can you help? Thank you so very much for any advice you can offer to help resolve this error. I'm at a complete loss here.

Jennifer replies:

Hi Dana!

I'm thinking out loud here.

1. Does this customer appear more than once in your Customer List? If the answer is no, are you 100% certain? Because I'm wondering if some entries have posted to an incorrect or old customer name. If entries have posted among two or more customer names, this will mess things up.

2. I would also look at the difference between what is correct ($16,833.58) and what is shown in the Receive Payments screen ($17.112.32), which is $278.74. Can this number be explained somehow?

3. One other thing I just thought of is to go to the customer's name in the Customer List, right click, and select Enter Statement Charges. This opens the customer's A/R register.

You'll notice that there are three columns along the right. There should be different amounts on each line. Now notice a box at the bottom called Show Open Balance - check it. QB then removes any closed transactions from the first two columns, but keeps the running balance in the third. What remains in the first two columns are any transactions that are still Open (also called Unapplied). See if this gives you any clues.

4. If you are certain that all the entires are posted under the correct name, then I am at a loss without actually seeing your file. This is because all of the reports you mention feed directly into the Receive Payments window - in other words, any transaction you see in that window (and, by the way, transactions appearing here are considered "open" transactions) comes from those reports, especially the ones labeled "Open".

Sorry that I couldn't give you a definitive answer about how your customer's accounts receivable is incorrect, but hopefully I've given a few clues to help. Let me know how it goes by posting a comment below. Thanks for writing.