Sometimes, you don’t have all the necessary information to book a payment immediately. In some cases, a suspense account is an answer. A suspense account is a general ledger account in which amounts are temporarily recorded while you wait until you have enough information to move forward. Eventually, you allocate entries in the suspense account to a permanent account. For example, if you’ve sent a claim to the insurance company, you don’t know yet how much they will actually reimburse. Pending the actual receipt, you can book the payment for the full amount on a suspense account. In this article, we will explain how to book a preliminary payment on a suspense account.
Before you start
- You need permission to be able to add ledgers and access payments. Permissions can be adjusted by practice administrators in
> General Settings > Role Management. - You must have a suspense account set up. See our Related articles for more information. When you want to create a suspense account for insurance claims use the following settings: add the ledger as a ‘Cash/Bank‘ ledger, set the nominal to “Liquid Assets”, set the start amount to “0”, set the VAT to “none” and set the payment option to “no”.
Step-by-step instructions
For the purpose of this article, we are using the following example: we have an invoice S-2020-0142 for £25,84 which we claimed with the insurance company Petplan, insurance claim number is CL-2021-0001. Pending the actual receipt, we want to book the payment on the suspense account Insurance Claims.
- Go to
> Financial > Balance Cash / Bank. - Click the current book year at the top of the page.
- In the bankbooks section, click Add New Transaction on the Insurance Claims row.
- On the next page, search for the invoice. You can search by client information (“client search”), invoice number, or invoice amount (open or total).
This is box titleNote that you can only use numbers in the field “invoice amount”. The field “client search” searches in the same way as the client search in the header bar. That means that you can search for more than the client name alone. See the related articles for more information. - Click Search invoices.
- In the middle of the screen, you now see an overview of the invoices that match your search criteria.
- Click the blue arrow to the right of the invoice. In this example: S-2020-0142.
- On the right-hand side, change the date to the date you sent the claim.
- Leave the amount field as is.
- Enter the claim number in the field “no.”.
- In the field “payment description” you can give extra information regarding this transaction. In our example we would mention that the claim is issued.
- Leave the box “book difference” unticked.
- Add your name in the “accepted by” field.
- Click Save.
Your transaction is added to the suspense account Insurance claims. The invoice is now marked as paid. In the related articles below you will find a link that shows you how to allocate the insurance payment when received.
Related articles
- How do I create an e-Claim?
- How do I add ledgers to my ledger scheme?
- How do I add a new transaction through Balances Cash/Bank?
- How do I allocate insurance payments?
- How do I update the status of an invoice that was only partially covered by the insurance?
- How do I exclude an invoice from debtors?
- Which specific fields are searched when I search for a client?