I find that most of my time on Kashflow is spent editing invoices created by the Paypal import. The process is extremely tedious and open to mistakes
At the moment, the steps are:
Import Paypal transactions
Look for where funds have been transferred to paypal from credit card (and not my bank account).
Create a new Bank transfer to deal with transfers from credit card to paypal (or vice versa in the case of a refund)
Delete these credit card transfers from the imported transactions list
Import the rest of the bank transfers (as they are correct being between my bank account and Paypal)
Look at the sales I have made - check for duplicates for NEW customers - import so far as the first transaction which is duplicated
Now import rest of sales (again looking for more duplicates)
-- If I do not check for duplicates, Kashflow usefully creates two copies of the same customer
Now work through my invoices. Each invoice I have to update the customer address as required to remove rubbish from the address - commas, bad addresses, blank addresses etc (even if they are an existing customer, Kashflow does not recognise this and use the existing details on the system)
For each item - it defaults to 0% VAT for no reason. I therefore have to edit every invoice to split the invoice into new lines, enter the VAT inclusive price on each line as a new Total
Of course, only the total is imported by Kashflow rather than the full details available through the PayPal API - so you have to split the total into separate lines for each item and shipping
If the customer needs their VAT number adding to the invoice - print off the invoice, delete it from Kashflow and then create a new invoice and add back the paypal payment.
This is horrendous - so many of these steps should be automated but Kashflow refuse to correct the errors in their import routines - so far as I can see, the PayPal import has not been updated in all the years that I have been using Kashflow.
The support team insist on looking at my account to then say "we can only create the data which PayPal provides us with" - which shows they are using the incorrect APIs.
So how can this be improved?
Look for duplication when creating new customers from imports
Assume ALL imported payments include VAT at the standard rate (rather than assuming 0%)
Allow for bank transfers to and from Paypal from different sources!
If an import uses an existing customer - use their details to populate the invoice rather than using the (basically awful) data which PayPal sometimes offers - at the very most, the address data provided by PayPal should appear as the separate shipping address!
Where I have checked the tickbox on a user's profile to "add line to invoice showing their VAT number" - do so on import as well as when creating a new invoice.
If the shipping address and payment address match then do not automatically add a "use a different shipping address" to the created invoice
LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS AND ACTUALLY ACCEPT THAT THE WAY THE SITE WORKS IS NOT ALWAYS THE BEST IDEA
Rich Mellor
