>>Um, not one invoice number...multiple invoices and multiple payments...There's the laziness of payment...guys who always pay a bit so they don't owe too much...guys who don't pay anything for months until they come up with a huge amount and they pay it all...advance payments, credit notes etc etc.
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>Yep - partial payments are near impossible. Full payments you have a chance at figuring out automatically.

For partial payments you can always split the debited amount into the paid and unpaid part. My system works when the total amount of partial payments matches the total amount of some invoices - where the number of each may be "any or more". For a single invoice (one among the many) and a payment that doesn't match any invoice, the user has a choice to apply it against any or not at all.

Generally, I've found this whole thing annoying - why do the accountants bother to know which invoices are paid and which are not? A debt is a debt is a debt. The total owed is a total owed, and if they need to calculate an interest on it, they only need to calculate it on the running total. But them being pesky as they usually are, there was a demand for this routine, so I eventually got to be the software hero of the week (several times :) when I got this to work. Although I think it's a bit pointless.

Um, yes, there was a legal obligation for any entity to compare the so-called "extract of open items", i.e. to match their reports on unpaid bills - customer with the supplier. So they did have to do this binding at least once a year, and they soon learned that the more often they run my autobind routine, the easier their life gets, as these reports get to be shorter and shorter, and they look smart and diligent in the eyes of their business partners.