Summary
When you move a location from one account to another, the Invoices and Payments move with the location. A problem arises when a Payment pays multiple Invoices and not all of the Invoices move. In this scenario the original location will have negative balance and the new location will have a positive balance.
IMPORTANT Due to the differences in how Fieldwork and QuickBooks Online (QBO) handle customer data those of you using QBO cannot Move a location. This is to prevent accounting issues in your QBO. If you move a location after it has been synced with QBO, future invoice/payment syncing will not work. Keeping locations stationary is the only way to maintain an accurate history with QBO.
Note You cannot move a main location or a location in an account if it's the only location. For information on how to resolve this, see: Move a Location to another account.
Key Points
Background
Match each payment to the invoices in each account
Background
We've found a common scenario occurs when taking a location owned by a realtor, for example, and moving it to a new account (the new owners of the house/location).
Both accounts might have a zero balance before the merge. After the merge the realtor will have a negative balance and the new account has a positive balance.
This occurs when a payment paid multiple invoices across multiple locations (which realtors do) and some of those invoices moved over with the location to the new account along with the payment, which is now split between two accounts causing the apparent chaos.
In this example we have two accounts, neither with a balance nor open invoice:
Miss Carol Howard is a realtor and she just paid off seven invoices for a couple locations with one payment. Melissa Russell bought a house from Carol and that includes some invoices that were paid with that one payment.
Now you want to move that location from Carol's to Melissa's new account. After the merge the money banner across the top of both accounts might now look like this:
Reasons for this to happen include:
One payment paid several invoices, some of which were moved from the realtor's account into the new account; some of which stayed behind
Payment then became split between two accounts
The new account's invoices are all paid, but some invoices aren't there so there's a negative balance
The realtor has a balance because the payment is gone
In this occurrence, we split the invoices between locations without splitting the payment. For accounting reasons the payment can't be divided up automatically.
Match each payment to the invoices in each account
To rectify this you need to connect the dots between invoices and payments. Grab yourself a pen and paper get ready to jot down all the invoices and payments involved. Once you've done that it's easy to visualize what needs to be done.
Match each payment to the invoices in each account:
Open the new account (Melissa's) where the merge went to
Go to the Payments tab
Open each payment and note the invoices it paid
4. Click the Invoices tab and match up the invoice numbers here with the invoice
numbers in the payment
5. Note each invoice that matches up to payments in this account (for some reason
doing it on paper makes the next steps easier to visualize as to what needs to be
separated from each account)
6. Click the Payments tab in Melissa's account
7. Keep the invoices paid that have a check mark in your notation
8. Zero out the other invoices
9. Recalculate the Amount Due
10. Enter that amount in the Amount line ($346.50)
11. Append the reference line to indicate that the payment is being adjusted
12. Tap Save & Apply
13. When you reopen the payment (in this example 2468) it will look like this:
(compare it to the original after step 3 above)
And Melissa's account is now back to having zero dollar amounts across the money banner:
Repeat this process with the source account (Carol's in this example).
14. Add a new payment duplicating the payment made in the first account
15. Referencing your notes, apply the payment to the unpaid invoices
16. Add up the amount and put it in the Amount box ($709.50)
17. Update the Reference # box
18. Click Distribute Payment
19. Click Save & Apply
20. The Payment box should look like this:
And Carol's account is now back to having zero dollar amounts across the money banner:
Going forward when you receive a payment to pay multiple invoices from a realtor, pay each invoice separately and use the check number/credit card approval number in the reference field so when you search for the number in a report, all the payments will come up. then when the time comes to merge the account to another account, you won't have to go through this.