Audience: Builders

Read time: 5 mins

Article contents: steps on how to 'refund' or credit a customer following job.

We'll cover both contract price/completion percent and cost-plus jobs in this FAQ.

In essence what you're doing here is "refunding" money from the contract value that the client has agreed to pay. This will be done via a negative variation and then attached to an invoice.

You can start the negative variation from either the Actuals Costing screen or the Variations screen.

1. Using Actual Costings is better if you want to refund a specific item.

2. Using Variations is better if you simply want to apply a lump sum.

More info on creating variations can be found here:

Regardless of where you start, the important information is that:

3. A negative number in the quantity box creates a negative amount.

4. The overall variation is negative.

Note: you are only able to add this variation to an existing invoice (one with an existing dollar value) as we cannot issue negative invoices.

5. Add the variation to the invoice.

6. The existing claim amount is deducted from the invoice.

In this situation you are charging the client a negative amount as a result of a negative purchase order or negative work order.

You can start this as either a work order or a purchase order, this will depend on whether the cost you're crediting to the client is to do with a supplier/contractor (purchase order) or an internal cost you're crediting the client (work order). In this example we use a work order.

1. The negative number in the quantity box creates a negative amount.

2. The overall work order is negative.

3. When you add this credit to an invoice it will attract the default markup. Most users only want to credit the non-marked up cost, hence making the markup 0%.

Notes: