jenop2, I will be contacting support, but given this thread started back in April 2023, I would hope that the underlying issue had been resolved on the QBO back end, and that there was some vigilance by QBO test/QA against future updates, such that the problem would no longer manifest for anyone else. That said, in the meantime, I am providing additional findings from my brief testing.
In my limited test scenarios thus far, partly in search of a quick workaround, I have found that the Account Summary only generates, and the payment request amount only cumulatively increases with each new invoice, if a customer account balance was initially set via the opening balance feature (amount and date fields) in the customer edit tool, resulting in an automated opening balance invoice. If this condition is met, the Account Summary then will only appear on the next (second) invoice and subsequent invoices that are created against the customer account. This is of course problematic for multiple reasons:
1. This doesn’t help with existing customers nor new ones that didn’t start with an opening balance and later might have a balance forward. The opening balance tool is only available (not grayed out) when there are no invoices or bills on the account. Also, you cannot enter a zero or negative amount for an amount in the opening balance tool, although it allows you to and doesn’t error. A zero will cause it to simply do nothing. A negative will generate a credit memo.
2. Even for “new” customers that do have some existing balance to enter as an opening balance, the QBO online help specifically states:
“Learn how to enter a prior balance for a customer that owes you money or a vendor you need to pay. – When you're adding a new customer or vendor with an open balance, leave the opening balance field blank. Instead, add your customer's unpaid invoices or your vendor's unpaid bills to QuickBooks. That way, it's clear what your customers are paying for and what you're paying your vendors for.”
So even in this focused use scenario, it’s not the recommended tool and avoiding it would cause the Account Summary section to not generate. Of course, if I use the tool I can go back to edit the autogenerated Opening Balance invoice to add any appropriate details. So the help guidance seems a bit misguided. While of course one would want as complete as possible invoice records, an opening balance tool/entry point is common and necessary for obvious reasons.
3. It shouldn’t matter if there is a zero balance forward or not! If the Account Summary is enabled in the template it should generate on the invoice.
Hopefully this information on the failure scenario I am seeing is useful to someone else in the forum. It’s a shame that Inuit staff do not take more initiative based on forum posts.
