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This question comes up somewhat frequently here at the Projector support desk. You have an initial invoice that the client likely paid. Then at some point you decide that the client overpaid on that invoice. What you want to do is take a portion of that initial payment and apply it as a credit on a later invoice. There are a few ways to address this, each with their own pluses and minuses.

Before getting into the solutions below, you may want to review our Creating Credit Memos When to Use a Credit Memo help page for a full introduction on how this works, as well as details on how your operational data may be affected by making changes to invoices only to satisfy the AR department's requirements.

The solutions below are ordered by what we consider "best practice," with the most optimal choice at the top.

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Tip
titleVoid & Reissue

This is the recommended method by Projector. What we are doing here is getting all the invoicing fixed in Projector, and handling any monetary issues outside of Projector as purely AR issues. The reason we recommend this is because incorrect invoices affect your operational data. Or in other words, invoices should accurately reflect who or what earned that revenue. Looking across an entire project the invoice changes may be small, but when you start looking at resource profitability by week, it could be large!

  1. Note the original invoice # as a reference
  2. Void the original invoice (but don't delete!)
  3. Remove or adjust any incorrectly billed items
  4. On the notes tab log the original invoice #, the amount the client overpaid, and the invoice # or draft invoice # that a credit will be applied to
  5. Reissue the invoice - you may want to renumber the invoice to something like INV00011-R1 to indicate it is reissue #1. This will be a hint to you that something atypical happened here.
  6. Have the client short pay the second invoice
    1. Optionally make a note in the client message that it should be short paid by $X
    2. Optionally call your client's AP department to ensure that they know about the short pay

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Tip
titlePrepayment

This is the second best method and also corrects for your operational data. It is a better solution than the previous suggestion if you aren't allowed to void the original invoice. What we do here is issue a credit against the original invoice to fix the operational data. Then we generate a prepayment invoice that reflects the original overpayment. Finally, we apply that prepayment to the followup invoice which gives the client a nice line item about their credit.

Before we get into the details though, this method ONLY works if the credit is being transferred to an invoice that is billed at the same level. For example, you bill at the project level, and both invoices are for the same project. Or you bill at the PO level, and both invoices are for the same PO. This restriction is in place because credits can't be transferred between levels. If you need a temporary workaround to get the prepayment over, see How to transfer prepayment.

  1. Issue a credit memo against the original invoice for the credit amount. You can optionally send this to the client if they need proof of the credit.
  2. Create a prepayment for the overpayment amount using a milestone
  3. On the second invoice, apply that prepayment from the Invoice tab


Tip
titleShort Pay

This method is similar to the previous one, but foregoes the prepayment and your second invoice will have no line item showing a credit.

  1. Leave the original invoice alone
  2. Issue a credit memo against the original invoice for the credit amount. You can optionally send this to the client if they need proof of the credit.
  3. Have the client short pay the second invoice
    1. Optionally make a note in the client message that it should be short paid by $X
    2. Optionally call your client's AP department to ensure that they know about the short pay

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