Hi James, 

I'd recommend looking at Bank Feeds rules a bit further for this, they allow both the creation of new transactions and matching to existing transactions in the system. The following guides explain more:

What are Bank Rules >

Manage Bank Rules >

If this helps, pleas click Verify Answer.

Regards,

Andy
Sage UKI

Hi, I still cant get this to work.

I have made a test rule for one of our customers that I want to automatically assign payments on the bank feed with invoices that have been created in sage.

The rule has been set up with the correct customer and transaction type is 'Payment on  account'. When you hit create on the transaction the customers account is still in debt as the transaction is not marked as paying off an invoice. The transaction does appear in activity in the customers account. Is there a way to get the transaction to link with a specific invoice, a bit like the Match function  

Hi James,

If the matching feature see's something that could be a match, but could also be linked to something else, it will just ignore.

If you want to automate direct debits and invoices, GoCardless may provide a better solution: Direct Debits >

Andy
Sage UKI

Ok, I don't want to send the customers a direct debit style payment demand as most of them already have a standing order set up. We cant change the way payments are being done for hundreds of people.

It is a storage rental business, there are lots of smallish payments each month, mostly from standing orders from the tenants. We have set up reoccurring monthly invoices for each customer in Sage.

Sage offers a match on some of the payments linking the payment to an invoice which is what I want, however most of the transactions are not matched so we have to manually match them which is very time consuming. In this thread you mentioned setting up rules might be the way to automate this but it seems it doesn't do what I want as it doesn't link a payment to an invoice?

Essentially I want to get sage to match the transactions but give it better parameters so it knows what to do with each transaction, a bit like a rule. It seems you cant give sage more information to make the matching feature work better?
Very few transactions are automatically matched even though the transaction info is the same or very similar every time.

Unless there is a totally different way to go about all this? We need to have invoices generated in sage so we can see whether the customer is behind with their payments.

Thanks

Hi James, thanks for the added detail.

Unfortunately, with the matching, if the software is not confident with a match it will not match, and it errs on the side of caution.

Whilst it doesn't help in the short term, you may want to submit a suggestion to the product Ideas Board for close matches to be offered to reduce then manual matching required. Sage Accounting Ideas Board >

I'll leave this thread open in case anyone in the community has encountered a similar issue and has a workaround.

Andy
Sage UKI

Hi James - I've struggled with similar & from my experiences, I can share the following:

The bank feed will only match if there is something in the payment reference that it can easily identify as being unique & link it to the invoice. So reference of 'storage' or the same amount recurring often won't do it. 

If it's an unusual amount then that's probably when it is finding matches for you - but even that isn't 100% guaranteed to be correct & always best to check before pressing the button.

As it's an invoice, you can't set up a rule in the same way that you could for just a money in or out transaction.

If it was one-off payments you could 'encourage' your customers to use the invoice number as the PAYEE reference (so what YOU see) but as it's a standing order & recurring monthly against different invoices then that won't work either.

Suggestion - haven't tested myself - what if you give customers a customer reference number on the customer record & they use THAT as the payee reference? That might help the automation identify at least a selection of invoices to pick from?

I just did the GoCardless x Sage Accounting beta programme & LOVE it! I have MANY recurring invoices for the same amount every month for the Sage subscriptions that I charge clients for & once I set this up (whcih did take effort & time I will admit) it just runs itself. You manage it from the recurring invoices screen.

Perhaps try it with new clients? Thre will be a cost for you on GC fees but I find that the low cost of that massively outweighs the time spent manually matching. 

Other than that, sadly it is a manual match but if it's any consolation none of the other accounts systems would manage it any better.

thanks, this is helpful. I'll look into how I can get a reference on the transactions.