Random sum = X

[speedman_2001]

Good afternoon to all.

We have a report that shows all of our customers and their AR amounts in an excel spreadsheet. All is fine on this part.

The problem we have on occasion is our customer writes us a check to cover some (not all) of their invoices but have no indication of what invoices they are paying , all they supply is a total amount .


My questions is this:
Has anyone ever seen or know of a program that will take a set of random numbers and show me all possibilities that add up to total X? What we are trying to accomplish here is basically guess at what invoices our customer is paying based off the sum of the invoices being the amount of the check.

All help is greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

 

[ajetrumpet]

you might want to consider buying a version of Quickbooks. It totals like this for you. You can do it in excel, but it's not worth the coding time...

 

[Bilbo_Baggins_Esq]

as ajettrumpet indicates, it can be done in excel, but it is not worth the time to do it.

In my opinion, the reason it is not worth the time is I have been told and shown on more than one occasion that it is not legal. I'm not a lawyer, but I have seen this play out before.
If the customer does not specify, it is your only obligation to deduct the amount paid from the total owed in sum. if you system is set to account invoices only as paid in full, or due in full, I would modify the system to accept or apply partial payments and then deduct invoices in the order in which they were incurred with a partial payment for the last amount not larger than the oldest unpaid invoice.

Also, one other potential confusion is, what if there is more than one possible combination which equals the amount paid?

Also, let’s say there is only one combination which matches, you apply the payments accordingly, and then later the customer comes back with a dispute on one of the transactions which he/she thought was still unpaid, but was marked paid based on your guess as to how to apply the payment.

I seriously doubt your company built this “guessing” time into its overhead (even if it is made more efficient with some code).

No, it's not your burden to make these "guesses". It is the customer's burden to specify.
Absent specificity, you can just apply it to all the oldest invoices until the amount paid is accounted.

 

[speedman_2001]

Aj & Bilbo, thanks for your responses. I figured there is a way to VB code a macro or what not to do what we are looking for but as you both said, too time consuming to be worth it. And yes Bilbo, I agree, shouldn't be our responsibility to "guess" at what they are paying but sometimes you work with what you get. Also, our accounting program does allow partial pays, accounting just wants to keep it as simple as they can.

By no means do I want anyone to spend any amount of time trying to figure this one out. Just wanted to put this out to see if anyone has seen such a program.

Thanks again for the responses.