You have made the sale and since your customer didn’t pay in cash at the spot of making the sale, you did recognize a receivable against the customer on your balance sheet. All is fine and good and now the date for the real payment arrives. Your customer is a decent company and it’s going to pay up its debt in due time. As such, the accountant over there is making a bank transfer to send the money to your account. The moment you can actually see the transfer is when it arrives to your account, however.

So you open your bank statement for the period (i.e., day, week or a month) and notice that the payment has arrived. The accounting entry for this should be as follows:

Db: Bank accounts
Cr: Accounts receivable

As your client paid up, you should on one side account for the money (in this case the bank account and when you have several accounts, the one it reflects on your balance sheet) and with the other part of the entry, decrease the receivable balance in the same amount obviously. On those occasions when the client did not pay for the full amount, you can only decrease the balance in the amount they paid so that the remainder stays as a receivable on your balance sheet.

As for the date, if you’re taking those statements for a longer period, do pay attention to the date the payment was done and try to make the entries with the date the actual payment was done and with the date you’re making the entry. Why? The main reason for this is to keep a clean and accurate record of all transactions so that when you go back in events for whatever reasons (i.e., disputes , etc.), you can see when the actual payment was in fact done.