A head office pays you once a month for every site you supply. You invoice each site under its own customer account, because each one orders separately and wants its own statement, but the money arrives as one transfer with one remittance listing invoices from eight accounts. The receive payment screen asks you to pick a customer first, and the payment belongs to all of them.
In Xero, one batch payment can include invoices from any number of contacts. In QuickBooks Online, record one payment per customer into Undeposited Funds and group them into one bank deposit. The same situation comes up wherever a group, a franchise, a council or a property manager pays for the accounts you bill, and this guide takes each ledger in turn, then covers the credit notes, which are where it usually goes wrong.
Why the payer and the accounts don't line up
You set customer accounts up around who orders and who needs the paperwork. The payer sets its payment run up around its own bank account. A national chain with a central accounts payable team, a parent company paying its subsidiaries' suppliers, or a managing agent paying for several buildings will all pay many of your accounts at once. Neither side is doing anything wrong. The remittance is just organised by payer, and your ledger is organised by customer. The longer the payer's list of sites, the more time goes on sorting lines into accounts before any payment is recorded.
Merging the accounts into one isn't usually an answer. You'd lose the per-site statements and history the sites asked for, and the next remittance from a different group would need a different merge. The fix is in how you record the payment, not in the customer list.
In Xero: one batch payment can span contacts
Xero is the easier of the two here. A Xero payment is recorded against an invoice, not against a contact, so a batch payment can include invoices from as many contacts as the remittance lists.
- Go to Sales, filter Awaiting Payment, and search for the invoice numbers on the remittance. Tick each one, whatever contact it sits under.
- Choose Batch payment, check each amount against the remittance and adjust any that were part-paid.
- Post it with the payer's name and remittance number in the reference, so the batch is easy to find from any of the contacts it touched.
The batch posts as one transaction and matches the single deposit in the bank feed. Find & Match in bank reconciliation does the same from the bank line, and lets you search across all contacts while you tick. Batch payments take invoices in your base currency only and stop at 200 invoices. A group paying in another currency needs one payment per invoice instead, and a very long remittance needs the approach in our guide to the 200-invoice batch limit.
Some groups send one remittance but pay each site in its own transfer, so the bank feed shows four lines rather than one. Then a single batch won't match anything. Record a batch, or a payment, per transfer instead, each covering only the invoices that transfer paid, and keep the remittance number in every reference so the set is easy to find again. Read the bank lines before you start: the remittance tells you which invoices were paid, but only the bank tells you how the money actually arrived.
In QuickBooks Online: one payment per customer
QuickBooks Online ties every payment to a single customer, so a remittance covering eight separate customers becomes eight payments. Done in the right order, they still come out as one deposit that matches the bank.
Recording it
- Group the remittance's lines by customer first, in a spreadsheet or on the printout, and total each group.
- For each customer, open Receive payment, tick that customer's invoices and enter the group total. Use the same reference number on every one, usually the payer's remittance or payment number.
- Deposit each payment to Undeposited Funds (Payments to deposit in some regions), not straight to the bank.
- Create one Bank deposit that selects all eight payments. Its total should equal the transfer, and it matches the bank feed line in one step.
If the payments were posted straight to the bank account instead, the bank feed can still match one line to several payments, but grouping them in a deposit first is easier to check and easier to undo. Our guide to clearing Undeposited Funds covers tracing a deposit that won't balance.
What about sub-customers?
If the sites are set up as sub-customers of a parent, QuickBooks has a "Bill parent customer" option on each sub-customer. It's a billing setting: it changes who the invoices and statements are addressed to, which affects far more than how you receive one payment. Where the sites are billed with the parent, one payment under the parent can cover their invoices. Where each site's invoices are billed to its own sub-customer, record a payment for each sub-customer as above. The shared reference number and the single deposit keep them together.
Credit notes: the line that breaks it
Group remittances often net off a credit raised by one site against invoices owed by another. The payer sees one supplier and one balance. Your ledger sees a credit on one account and invoices on another, and neither Xero nor QuickBooks will apply a credit from one separate customer account to another.
- Same account: apply the credit to that account's invoices in the usual way, and the payment for that account is reduced by the credit.
- Different accounts: you need a transfer between the two accounts first, usually a journal or a refund-and-reapply your accountant is happy with, before the credit can offset the other site's invoice. Agree the method once and use it every time, because the payer will keep doing it.
Before you record anything, add up the remittance by account and check each credit note belongs to the account whose invoice it was deducted from. A credit that sits on one account but reduced another's invoice needs moving across first.
A worked example
The figures here are illustrative. A facilities group pays you 9,840.00 for March. Its remittance lists eleven invoices across four sites, and one line is a credit of 360.00 raised for a site that was overcharged in February.
- North site: three invoices, 2,400.00.
- South site: four invoices, 3,600.00.
- East site: two invoices, 1,800.00, less its own credit of 360.00, so 1,440.00.
- West site: two invoices, 2,400.00.
The four groups total 9,840.00, which agrees with the bank. In Xero that's one batch payment with eleven invoices in it, once the credit has been allocated to an East site invoice. In QuickBooks it's four payments, one per site, with East's credit applied inside East's payment, all four grouped into one bank deposit of 9,840.00.
Had the credit belonged to North but been deducted from an East invoice, the deposit would still total 9,840.00, but an East invoice would be left 360.00 open and North would hold a credit nothing can use until it's moved across. That's the cross-account case from the section above, and it's worth checking for before you start.
Keeping each site's statement right
The reason for separate accounts is that each site sees its own position, so the payment record should make sense from the site's side too.
- Put the payer's remittance number in every payment's reference, not only the first.
- Attach the remittance to each invoice, or to the batch payment, so a site querying its statement can see who paid.
- Send the sites their statements after the payment is posted, not before, so nobody chases an invoice head office has already paid.
- Note short payments on the invoice. A site that sees an open balance it thinks head office cleared will ask, and the answer is easier with the remittance attached.
How RemitClear handles a remittance across accounts
RemitClear matches a remittance by the invoice numbers on it, so it doesn't matter which customer account each invoice sits under. Matching handles exact, partial and prefix-based invoice numbers, and the review screen shows each line beside the invoice and the customer it belongs to.
In Xero, the matched invoices post as one batch payment or as separate payments, whichever you've chosen, and you can set that choice per contact. In QuickBooks Online, RemitClear groups the lines by customer and posts one payment for each, into Undeposited Funds for you to group into the bank deposit, or straight to the bank account you choose. Credit notes are applied against their own customer's invoices. In both ledgers, a credit that would have to cross customers stops the post with a reason, so it's dealt with before any money is recorded. To try it with a group remittance of your own, see remittance matching for wholesale and distribution or RemitClear for QuickBooks Online.
