Ben - I agree that reversing a transaction in the long past is a BAD practice. However, in this case the erroneous transaction was dated 30Sept, and the error was discovered and corrected on 2 Oct when the end of month processing for September was being done.

The transaction hiding facility is something we need because of the way we lock finalised transactions.  In the Quickbook Pro system I use, I can happily correct any error by editing the transaction and I can enter transactions for past dates. In OpenVPMS one cannot edit a finalised transaction so a hiding mechanism is necessary to hide our mistakes from the customer.

Because one always does Month End processing after the end of the month, it is highly likely that an error in a transaction close to the end of the month will not be discovered until early in the next month resulting in the reversed/reversing pair being split across the month boundary.

Even without a hiding facility, one cannot enter a corrective transaction with a past date so one cannot correct the customer's account for the previous month. It should not be necessary to append a note to the customer's statement saying 'sorry - we know invoice 123 for $456 is an error - please deduct $456 from the amount payable'.

However, there is a problem.  Looking at the customer's account we have:

So if the reversing credit had been dated 30/9 although it was entered on 2/10, the Opening/Closing balance pair would be incorrect and thus the next month's statement will be screwed up.

Perhaps the way out is to modify the statement template so that it hides hidden transactions but does not bitch about hidden transaction mismatches, and also adds in an 'Adjustments' line at the end so that what is printed on the statement plus the adjustments add to the total at the bottom that we are asking the customer to pay. This adjustments line will only appear when there are mismatched hidden transactions.

Thus in the above case invoice 3354151 would not appear on the statement, there would be an adjustments line at the bottom for -258.50 and the Balance Due number would be $8,116.50 not the $8,375 shown in the closing balance above.

In the next month's statement, the opening balance would be $8,375 and (assuming no other hidden transactions) there would be an adjustments line at the bottom for +258.50 to offset the hidden credit.

Conclusion: the reversal mechanism should be left as is, but I should adjust the statement templates to work as suggested above. I will discuss this with the practice manager and chief accountant before doing so - but I suspect that we will go this way.

Tim A - yell if you want the standard statement to be modified.