I had a situation in which a client had underpaid one invoice by $12 and overpaid another by $24. I applied the overpayment to the underpaid invoice, which left a credit balance of $12. Since I didn’t expect to issue any new invoices to this client for a while, I decided to refund the balance. This is where my pain began.
I’m using QuickBooks Pro 2010. I have a love/hate relationship with this software. I love that it does almost everything that I need. I hate that Intuit plays vendor lock-in in order to sell all sorts of other products and services. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any open source software that does what I want, and I’m not going to trust my business’s critical financial data to a SaaS.
All of the information that I found was geared toward issuing a full refund of an overpayment or issuing a credit memo (which creates a new, separate credit) and then refunding that.
After lots of Googling, I finally put the answer together:
- Click on Customers -> Create Credit Memos/Refunds
- On the Credit Memos window, click on the “Use Credit to” button on the toolbar and select “Give refund” (really obvious, right?)
- You’ll be prompted with “This credit memo has no amount to be refunded. Would you like to create a refund check that is not directly linked to this credit memo?” Answer “Yes”.
- Enter the name of the customer/job in “Pay to the Order of”.
- Enter the memo, select “to be printed” or enter the check number, etc.
- In the account field, enter “Accounts Receivable”. This is critical. If you don’t, it won’t be applied to the customer’s balance, and they’ll still have an outstanding credit.
- Finish your other options and save the check.
I don’t know why Intuit hid the ability to issue refunds not connected to credit memos (hate) or why I couldn’t find any useful information about how to do this in the help (hate hate), but at least I can do it. I hope that this post saves someone else the time and frustration of trying to figure it out.
