Request: Designate account for prepayment

It would be nice when we receive payments from customers to be able to designate the actual bank account that the payment is being processed to.
For instance, we take cash, check, credit card, and paypal. It would be nice if we could receive a prepayment directly to a chosen bank account instead of having to take another step and alter it through the deposit screen. This software already has so many layers it would be nice to allow an extra step to be skipped here.

@J_Ochs That’s understandable, and not an uncommon piece of feedback we’ve received.

The reason we use the AR payment process as is, Payment > Deposit > Account, is because we want the system to more accurately reflect the reality of those payments. Let’s say you take multiple check payments over the course of a week, and then on Friday you take those checks to the bank and deposit them. As far as your bank records are concerned, you’ve only done one transaction. So in Cetec you need a way to group those payments together, and then represent the single deposit to the bank account. Then, if you perform a bank reconcile, you can match a single deposit in Cetec to a single transaction on your bank statement, instead of trying to reconcile the individual check payments.

From a bookkeeping standpoint, the time between you entering the payment and actually depositing the checks also needs to be accounted for. Even though you’ve recorded the payment, thereby reducing your receivables, you haven’t actually put money in to your bank account (assets). So by default the deposits use “Undeposited Funds” to represent the transition between the two.

Ultimately it comes down to the level of detail you need/require. Some customers don’t care about reporting/reconcile beyond the point of receiving the payment. So they just create one deposit that takes all of their AR payments, and will periodically close it and start a new one as needed.

Hopefully that makes sense, and sheds some insight in to why the payments were designed that way. Let us know if you have any other questions about it!