I am opening up discussion on how refunds should be allocated or if they should be allocated at all. Is this a customer decision that needs a setting?

Tom,

We have a report called the Payment Allocation Report and it will allocate payments across all invoice items.

If a credit and subsequent refund are applied to the invoice we currently allocate a portion of each payment to the refund amount. Essentially, we treat the refund line item as something that needs a payment. We had heard from some customers who want it to be omitted from this report while others want it treated as its own line item and not part of any allocation calculation.

Example, a membership with a modifier totals $100. The member pays $100 of which $20 was for the modifier.  Later the amount of the modifier is credited off and a refund is given to the member. The payment allocation report will allocate a portion of the $80 remaining payment to the Membership and the Refund. It will also allocate a portion of the $20 credit to the Refund.  This results in the payments being allocated to items that did not need to be paid off as they had an offsetting amounts.

Are there invoice item types that should be exempt from payment allocation or is this something that is decided per customer as part of their specific accounting practice?