One needs to reverse a payment under the following circumstances:

1. wrong payment type used (ie cheque instead of EFT, etc)
2. wrong amount entered
3. wrong customer used (in Hong Kong this is quite possible because the local banking system does not provide the ability to add Reference information to any bank transfers, and hence when $123 arrives in the practice's account, the only way to figure out who paid it is to look for customers owing $123)
4. bounced cheque or credit card declined

In the first three cases the screw up is ours and we want to hide our errors from the customer, ie not show them on the customer's statement. In all 4 cases, it would be useful to be able to edit the Notes and Reference fields of the Refund transaction so as to provide a rationale for the refund.

Hence we would like a project created to:

1. provide the ability to edit the Reference and Notes field (which defaults to 'Reversal of payment nnnnn') of the Refund transaction
2. add a flag to the transaction which can be used to suppress the reversing and reversed transactions in the customer's statement. Thus the reversal confirmation screen would display the Reference and Notes fields for the reversing transaction, and also a 'Hide in Statement' checkbox (default unticked).  If this was ticked then both the reversing transaction and the reversed transaction would have this flag set. To take advantage of this facility the statement items jrxml would need to be adjusted to not print items with the Hide flag set. If the jrxml was not updated then things would work as presently - ie all your screw ups visible to the customer.

Note that the above discussion is essentially aimed at the reversal of a payment (which generates a refund). However, I suspect that the same facilities would be of benefit when reversing other types of transactions.

Finally a note on the adjustment of the customer statement to suppress printing of the transactions with the Hide flag set. If the transaction being reversed is in the current period, then there is no problem - both the reversing and reversed transactions will be suppressed leaving the balance unaltered.  However, if the reversed transaction is in a prior accounting period, then we have a problem and really do need to show the reversing transaction (otherwise the opening balance plus the sum of the printed transaction amounts will not match the balance owning). I think that the answer to this lies in sorting the transaction on the hide flag and showing this with the Hide flag set at the bottom of the statement only if their total is non zero.

Can others please comment so that I can ask Tim A to create and cost a project for this.

Note that the initial request from the practice manager was for a facility to delete finalised payment transactions. However, after some discussion this morphed into the above design which allows the full set of transactions to be kept but allows the errors to be hidden from the customer.

Regards, Tim G