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I paid an invoice in July 17 and the company has today contacted me to advise that accountant just completed their annual audit and discovered that their invoice was incorrect and that I owe the business $AUD 600. Do I have to pay this? If yes, the invoice I was provided with today only gives me 2 1/2 days to pay which i find completely unreasonable. What would be reasonable?
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I would have a chat to your friendly lawyer. I would be cautious about paying this account and my first response would be to say that the invoice was rendered and paid and the matter is now closed. Does the company have an agreement with you whereby they can review the price subsequently? Was there any obvious error in the calculation of the invoice so that there was mutual misunderstanding? I think that you would probably find that 2 ½ days to pay an invoice that should have been dealt with last year is very much unreasonable if the error has only just been discovered. Presumably you had no input into the error being made? There may however be specific details which impact on the advice so I would recommend that you discuss it with a lawyer but certainly you would have good grounds to have that conversation. Assuming that you are in business you should be able to claim your legal fees as a tax deduction.
Thank you so much Patrick. Yes I run a very small dance school business which is why this 'accounting error' is painful. The invoice was issued by a ticketing website called www.townsvilletickets.com.au which I used to sell tickets online for a dance event in July. Customers pay through the ticketing website and revenue accumulates. Once the event has taken place, I get revenue minus ticketing fees is paid out within a few days and an invoice is issued.
The website offers an automatic refund option if for some reason customers do require a refund of a purchased ticket. As it happens, several of my customers did and thus in July I issued those refunds electronically. Once they got approved by the ticketing provider, I presumed that the revenue listed on my dashboard accurately reflected revenue versus ticketing fees. The event invoice issued in July does not itemise the refund but does itemise ticketing fees. Now Townsville Tickets claims that as a result of accounting error (part-time staff accountant, their own fault - I quoted!) never deducted the refund from my account and thus I owe them the respective sum.
Does that change the way you see things?