Q - How do I handle a short payment by a customer in QuickBooks? How do I just write off the amount if it is not worth pursuing or if I do not want to pursue collection?
A - When a customer short pays an invoice a couple options are available to you. You can leave it as an underpayment or you can write off the extra amount. In the example below the invoice due was for $13,500 but the customer only paid $13,450. So what do we do with the $50 short payment? You can either pursue the payment of course or you can write it off to your account of choice, generally "bad debt" unless there are extenuating circumstances.
In this scenario we are going to write off the $50 to bad debt. When you Save the transaction a window pops open so you can choose the appropriate write-off account. You can also choose a Class if desired.
The accounting behind the scenes after this transaction is that the total accounts receivable amount of $13,500 is now zero and bad debt expense has been hit with $50 as shown below.
