An employee of mine accidentally issued the wrong check amount on the invoice, because the invoice had an item taxed that wasn't supposed to be taxed, and therefore increased the amount of the invoice by $1.50. He didn't pay attention to the total of the invoice, and entered the check amount that the invoice was asking for instead of the amount that was on the check.
Because the payment was 1 single payment, and the invoice was marked as fully paid, the only option I had was to refund the entire invoice and it wouldn't allow me to delete the payment or issue another payment. Once I selected refund entire invoice, it basically treated the invoice as being cancelled. I then had to proceed to duplicate the invoice and reissue the correct check amount. This automatically sent an invoice to my customer saying that their entire purchase was refunded.
The issue arose because there is no delete payment option. I can understand delete payment for credit card transactions can cause issues, but checks and cash are physical items you keep on your person until you deposit them into your bank. There should be no reason to completely start over on an invoice because of a slip of the finger or simple adding mistake.
The second issue is the fact that I couldn't edit the invoice once total payment was rendered, meaning I couldn't subtract the $1.50 tax and then issue a fake refund to the customer for the incorrect check amount and correct the problem that way.
A simple delete payment button should be added to any non credit card payments so simple human errors don't cause huge issues. Every other invoicing system has the ability to delete payments, Square should have it too.
Now for the people about to comment that there is an issue refund option on the square invoice, that is correct, however, it still comes up on your report as a refund on your gross sales report. If I were interested in running a panzi scheme I could enter amounts that are wrong and return them on half my transactions and let all my potential investors see my huge gross sales numbers, but that would not be ethical or correct.
Thus ,a refund is not the correct response for canceling a payment. It actually does affect your sales numbers and throws off useful analytics that companies use for knowing how much they sold. The transaction I am referring to was over $4000.00, so now my monthly sales this month show me doing a really good month, until you actually look at my net sales.
I would like to see Square join the rest of the online retail community in adopting accounting practices that have been around for hundreds of years and actually allow people to cancel payments instead of using a round about method that throws off sales numbers.
Thanks
