Hi Tony,

Fundamentally we would like payments that appear in our bank statement to appear in the same VAT quarter that they are made. On a day to day basis it doesn’t matter if a transaction appears in the bank statement and is reported in openVPMS the following day or even the following week but at the margins of this example lies the problem. At end of VAT quarter the transactions that enter our bank account up to midnight that day must have VAT paid on them for that quarter so they have to be reported as having occurred in that quarter.

There is no concept of bank clearance in the UK. Banks subscribe to the faster payments system and unless a transaction fails a fraud filter, it appears instantly in our account when a person makes it no matter the time of day.

Perhaps in a more traditional practice this is less of an issue as most transactions would happen face to face. In our ambulatory practice though, in excess of 90% of transactions are made by EFT.

We are a tiny practice and don’t expect to get any special consideration based what works for us but the ability to enter a payment on the date that it was made rather than the date that it was entered would be immensely helpful. I’m yet to test it but I think making that node in the payment archetype writeable should do the job.

The transaction that I need to correct may just need to be manually accounted for in this vat quarter and next by the accountant. So be it if it is too dangerous to make a manual update to the transactions.

The reason the error occurred in the first place (other than me being careless) is that the idea of clearing a till and depositing it doesn’t really happen for us.

EFT payments are deposited before they ever see the openVPMS system. Credit card payments don’t have a chit as we take them online through a portal system. Cheques and cash are potentially the only items that might be regarded as being in a till and even then cheques are not physically deposited but rather scanned on an app where they clear into our account the following day. This means that hitting deposit on a till clearance that contains more than one type of payment doesn't match physical reality.

The ability to clear individual payments from the till (or even groups of payments by payment type) as they are reconciled against the bank statement and daily credit card statement from the portal supplier would be amazing and work for our style of practice. Similarly being able to selectively deposit items from a till clearance as they find the bank account would match the reality of our transactions.

At the moment, and since the payment cock up of mine, we are trying to make the till clearance/deposit system work for us by clearing the till after recording groups of EFT payments before we take any further cash, cheque or card payments. We then clear that again before taking any further EFT payments. This is all made a bit harder because the on screen display does not include the transaction type in the grid display. I’m guessing you did this to save a join statement but it makes it much slower to reconcile as we have to generate the report rather than just doing it off the grid display.

As stated earlier, ours is such a niche application of openVPMS so we don't expect you to make any significant changes based on our unusual set up.

Kind regards

Chris