the independent online community for xero users

Customising Invoices - Invoice Date Issue

Hello,

I am the owner of a recruitment firm and was hoping someone could help us with an accounting issue.

We place people into permanent positions and charge a one-time fee.

For each placement, there are 2 key dates for us: 1) Accept Date - when the candidate accepts and signs the offer letter and 2) Start Date - when the candidate starts his/her new job and we are able to invoice the client. The Start Date can sometimes be 3-6 months after the Accept Date as candidates have to serve notice, want a quick holiday before starting a new job, needs to relocate overseas etc etc.

For management purposes, we recognise the revenue on the Accept Date as there is a very good chance we will get this revenue. However, our clients will not let us invoice then until the Start Date.

The issue we are facing is that if we use the Accept Date as the Invoice Date, then revenues are recognised properly in terms of the date for reporting purposes, but we need to manually change the Invoice Date on the Invoice, as it shows the Accept Date, not the Start Date.

If we use the Start Date as the Invoice Date, then invoices are notated correctly, but revenues are recognised on the Start Date instead of the Accept Date, therefore the revenue reporting are meaningless for management.

How can we solve this? What's a good solution to deal with this issue?

Thanks for your help!

Tags: Customising, Date, Invoice, Invoices

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeff on February 7, 2012 at 16:36

We have the same issue in reverse. We will invoice for a number of bookings in advance, but only recognise that revenue when teh service is performed. We use the manual journals to post the revenue nito the correct date, but have been very careful to use standardised wording in the product description to the correct revnue can be identified.

We use the Income in Advance nominal codde as a catch-all to put new bookings in. The use the Account Transactions report, export it to Excel and manipulate it from there to get our manual journal amount.

if you are looking for a code breakdown then forget it. The very helpful Tracking Codes don't actually appear in any meaningful erport you could use for this purpose, so we have "split" the product description by hyphens "-" and then used excel's text to columns function to separate the text into manipulable fields. Complicated? Yes, but i am finding most things in Xero are not actually as straightforward as they would like you to think.