The aging still shows an invoice that's already paid
You received the payment. The invoice itself shows a zero balance. And the aging report still lists it as outstanding.
The invoice is not unpaid, and no transaction is missing. You are reading a photograph of a month that has already been taken, and the payment landed after the shutter closed.
The 30-second check
1. Open the document itself and read its own balance. Every invoice, bill and credit note carries a running balance: what it was raised for, what has been settled against it, and the remainder. That balance is rewritten in the same instant you create or void a settlement — before the screen comes back. If the document says zero, the document is right.
2. Look at which month you asked the report for. This is the dividing line, and it is not labelled anywhere on the screen:
- Ask an aging report for the current month and it works the figure out live, from the documents.
- Ask it for any earlier month and it reads a stored row that was written at the start of the following month.
The same screen switches engines under you without saying so.
3. Run the same question as an “as of today” report. Outstanding Document, Aging and Statement of Account all read each document’s own live balance. They are never stale. If the invoice has gone from those and is still sitting in the historical view, you have your answer and you can stop looking.
What actually happened
A scheduled job runs at 01:00 on the first of each month. It takes every document that still has a balance, and writes one row per document stamped with the last day of the month that just ended. That row is what the historical aging reports read.
Two details decide almost every complaint about these reports:
- A document already settled when the job runs gets no row at all for that month. The job only photographs documents with a balance left on them.
- A row, once written, is never corrected by the monthly job. It will not overwrite what is already there for that document and that month-end.
Put those together and the symptom explains itself. The customer paid you in March. You keyed the receipt on the 4th of April and dated it back to March, which is ordinary and correct. At 01:00 on 1 April the invoice was still open, so the March row says outstanding — and it will say outstanding for ever, unless somebody rebuilds that month. Meanwhile the document, and every “as of today” report, correctly shows it settled.
Neither screen is wrong. They were asked different questions.
What to do about it
| What you are doing | What to read |
|---|---|
| Chasing money this week | The “as of today” reports — Outstanding Document, Aging, Statement of Account. Live, never stale. |
| Reporting a position at a past month-end | The historical aging, which is the photograph — and only useful if a photograph was actually taken that month. |
If a past month genuinely has to be right — because it is going to an auditor, or because it is the basis of a provision — the stored month has to be rebuilt, and that is not a button in the reporting applets. It is a request.
When it is a support matter
Two signatures, and it is worth reporting them in these words:
- A past month still reads wrong after the underlying document was corrected. Some correction paths mend the history and some do not: creating settlements in bulk triggers a rebuild of the affected months, while correcting or voiding a single settlement updates the document and leaves the history alone.
- The document shows a settlement applied and the history shows the same document at its full original amount — that is, the history has the invoice but not the offset against it.
Raise it with the two screen names, the two numbers, the company and the month. Naming the month is what makes a rebuild quick rather than open-ended.
What this page cannot tell you
- No screen stamps the row with when it was taken. The last day of the month is on the report; the fact that it was written at 01:00 on the following day is not.
- Rebuilding a past month’s aging is not self-service. No screen in the reporting applets offers it.
- Whether the underlying figure is right is a question for the documents, not for this page. All this tells you is which of the two you are reading.
Related documentation
- Debtor Report applet and Creditor Report applet — which of their reports read live document balances and which read the aging history.
- Debtor and Creditor Report applet — the four historical reports and the Statement of Account aging tab.
- Which figures BigLedger stores, and which it works out fresh — the same trade-off in the other four places it appears.