Customer payment on account to be refunded?

I would raise a debit note to the customer's account, outside the scope of VAT. The opposite entry will go to suspense. Then debit the cheque to the same account to clear.

To achieve this do a cheque payment, remembering to select the customer name in the Customer:Job column. This will post the cheque to the Accounts Receivable account and allocate it to the named customer.

You need to write a cheque to the customer, using Accounts Receivable as the account name, AND the customer name in the customer:job column.

Wasn't there some comments on AccountingWeb saying that QuickBooks has changed the use of posting cheques to accounts payable at least for some reports. I don't know why it seemed a very efficient way of doing it.

There was such a discussion, although we are talking about Accounts Receivable, not Payable here as it is a Customer Refund.  I'm going to check out the reporting though, as I haven't had any problems myself - See if I can force some errors.

I have worked through all the reports I might ever need for Customers and Suppliers - Ageing, unpaid bills, open invoices, etc - and have not found any problems with cheques posted to Accounts Payable, or to Accounts Receivable.  They all show up in the right places.  I think the key is to have all three items correct on the cheque:

Name of the supplier (or customer) to whom the cheque is paid

AND Accounts Payable as the account name (or Accounts Receivable if you are doing a refund of an overpayment, or indeed a refund for any reason)

AND the supplier (or customer) name in the column header customer:job - this last is the one that causes problems as it is called Customer:job even on a supplier cheque.

Another42,

Thank you - just the sort of checking that takes time, thank you for doing that, (& pointing out the odd idiosyncracy of the system such as the "Customer:Job" heading in cheque payment).