[freeside] customer prepay

[Curtis Maurand]

Prepayment is considered a subscription.  Subsciptions are a  liability
until they are  used up.  The use of it accumulates daily and your
liabilities will fluctuate day to day based on prepayments or not.  If your
charging your customers in advance of their service, then you are running on
subscriptions  Its not income until after its been used.  Its an interesting
concept and will make for some funky programming.  I'm running into the
exact same problem.  Our accountants had a term for it that was something
like delayed revenue or some such crap.

According to my financial accounting text when you receive a payment in
advance, you debit cash and you credit unearned subcriptions.  Then at
predetermined intervals, you recalculate the value left on the subsriptions
by calculatiing how much to reduce the liability.  So the transaction to use
up some of the liability would look like a debit unearned subscriptions and
you credit subscription revenues.

Curtis


----- Original Message -----
From: "ivan" <ivan at 420.am>
To: <ivan-freeside at sisd.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: [freeside] customer prepay


> Pointers to information on accouting practices for "prepayments" would be
> appriciated.  I hesitate to add a "pending payment" field to cust_main
> without more information in this regard.
>
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 02:46:15PM -0500, Adam Rose wrote:
> > I know there has to be a simple solution to this problem.  We actually
had
> > a customer come in and prepay on there bill.  How do I pay on an invoice
> > that does not exist?  The invoice will generate on the 12th of this
> > month, but I would that to have a pending payment on the future invoice
so
> > that it does not send a bill to the customer and it does not show up as
an
> > open invoice.
> >
> > Freeside 1.3.1
> > linux 2.2.18
> > perl 5.00503
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -- Adam
> >
>
> --
> meow
> _ivan
>