Accounting details won't accept A/P account

So I have a bit of an unusual situation where the payment on an invoice sometimes needs to be made to an account payable. Unfortunately, “accounting details” does not permit an A/P account. For the time being, I am using an income account for this purpose, but it really isn’t income to our salon; the money is actually due to one of our IC’s.

Is there a way to handle this properly, or is there some way to force an A/P account into the accounting details?

TIA.

@cary, I understood your point of view, but let me ask something to you!

In the head of the Invoice, who is the company that is issuing the Invoice, your company or the Supplier Company?

I’m asking it, because in these cases you need move the entry to the company Cash, and from the Company Cash to the Supplier, it’s the normal accouting!

Not sure what you mean by my “point of view” as POV usually refers to some opinion. I don’t really have any opinion here, just a scenario to address.

The situation is not normal. We perform credit card processing on behalf of our contractors. They do not have their own processors, unfortunately. So when the invoice is created, the “income” is not really our own income, but rather that of the contractor we are performing that transaction/invoice for.

If there is a facility already available in ERPNext, I’d like to use it. So are you suggesting that I’d need to set up a separate (virtual?) company so the credit-side account would go to the contractor? That sounds plausible, accountingwise, and I’d agree. Trouble is, the money doesn’t actually go to any account at the contractor’s “company.” They don’t have such a thing, currently.

The money we are collecting on their behalf legally and financially belongs to the contractor. And we must pay it to them, sooner or later.

@cary, first: Sorry by my mistake with the words, I’m not a native English speaker!

I work in a company that process Credit Card, but here, we dont use ERPNext to manage all operation, ERPNext only track the value of the services, dont make sense, use ERPNext Accounting for this purpose!

But if you will do the accouting of operations for this company, the aproach is this! Create a Company for this Company and track each operation as a Invoice.

And as far as why WE are creating the invoice is more complicated. The contractors sometimes sell retail items that were purchased by the salon (contractors do sell some other retail of their own as well, but we have no interest in that other than commissions if we sell some of that). The contractors receive a commission from us for any sales of OUR retail items.

That means that, sometimes, retail product is involved, which means that we must use the invoicing to ensure that the inventory is properly credited in these transactions. For consistency, we use invoices for ALL contractor credit card and/or retail product sales.

I am not arguing (you indicated that I was expressing an opinion about how to do the accounting for this) that I am doing this any correct way. I am only saying that I need a way to do this that is convenient and relatively within the bounds of somewhat normal accounting practices.

I hope this clarifies my situation. Your experience may suggest a much better way, and one that uses this product appropriately.

I forget we have non-native speakers here. Please forgive this oversight on my part.

I totally understand what you are saying about this, but there is no other company here. These are IC’s. I’d imagine this should be handled no differently than any other type of operation involving contractors. I’m thinking of some of the courier companies I’ve worked for in the past.

So now I am wondering if I need to look at the contractor functions in ERPNext. But I think that applies more to manufacturing, not product or retail sales.

@cary, in the way that you manage the operation, you sound much more like a accounting company, instead of a credit card processing company.

So, do you need manage all of your customers as a Company

We are not a credit card processing company. We are not a public auditor. We are a beauty salon that sells both services and products. Sometimes our independent contractors (IC’s) sell our products. Sometimes an IC’s customer wants to pay for their services and/or products (which may be our products or not) using their debit or credit cards. The processor takes out a fee from the total and sends us the balance a day or two later. The net amount of the sale that we will receive from the processor is sent to the salon’s bank account, not the IC’s. Thus, there needs to be a way to credit the IC in some manner.

@cary, Maybe the IC can be managed as a Sales Partner, but do you need defined the comission % manually, to do the right calculation, so you can use the same operation while receiving to Pay the Sales Partner!

Yes, for their commissions. But there is still the original issue of this thread!

For now, I will continue to credit the contractor’s income account as a pseudo-A/P account. Then I will debit that account to the actual A/P account. It works, and will get me by until a better solution comes along.

Thanks for your help.

What if you issue the invoice to your IC’s customer (posting against an a/r account) and the IC get’s commission as your sales partner" (that’s more or less what @max_morais_dmm suggests in other words)

Then I’d have to do the accounting for the IC’s, and as it is, I’ve got my hands full with our own operation (and a number of other pursuits we are involved in, including another business). They are independent contractors, and we should not be doing too much for them due to the tax laws here.

Also, consider why would they necessarily get a commission in the first place? They don’t necessarily sell one of our products when their customer uses a credit card. Sometimes, they are just using our card processor for non-product purchases.

I do appreciate that both you and Max are trying to help me, just so you know. But these solutions would not work for us. I’m OK with crediting the temporary credit account and then debiting it to the A/P account. It’s an extra step I could avoid if the software allowed it, but that is not in the cards I guess.

@cary

If you set “Account Type” of the payable account (Contractor) as “Income Account” / “Temporary”, you should be able to select it in the Sales Invoice. That way, it will not be part of your income, but the invoice amount will be credited to the payable account.

It is already set as an income account. The problem is that I want it to be an A/P account.

Thank you for your help.

You can do simple customization to allow all accounts in Income Account. Use the following Custom Script for Sales Invoice to achieve this.

cur_frm.set_query("income_account", "items", function(doc) {
	return{
		filters: {
			'company': doc.company,
			"is_group": 0
		}
	}
});

So, from the looks of this code snippet (where would I make this change btw?), it looks like it will return a list of companies. But we only have one company. Keep in mind, please, the payee is an independent contractor, but they are not a company in the sense that our salon is a company. We don’t maintain bookkeeping for their work, only for their commissions (another issue I am attempting to resolve).

This does not return a list of Company. It returns all available accounts for the company selected in the invoice. Basically it does not restrict accounts based on any account type. Hence, you should be able to select contractors account as an income account in invoice.

To use the code, go to Setup → Customize → Custom Script and select Sales Invoice as Doctype and set the above code in the Script and save. You need to refresh the system after making this change.

OK. Thanks. I now see what the code snippet actually does.

I run “bench update” about once or twice a day. I am assuming that the system updates honor my local customizations.

Thank you for your help on this. It will cut out an extra step (extra manual journal entry), a minor nuisance but still this will be a great help.

How can I do this for Payment Types? I tried this, but the above code obviously doesn’t work for that. Probably have to change the parameters. I’d like to be able to create a payment type that debits an A/R account.