[Work] Does anyone know an easier way to word/say: please list positive and negative amounts separately and not together because I'm struggling to explain something over text.

Basically someone has handed me an invoice for $0 and it's because they made a few payments but it's all been refunded so the total is $0

please separate payments and refunds into different columns?

But I've asked them to still LIST their amounts. I even gave them this example:

Please list payments as:
$100
-$100
$100
-$50
-$50

And I got back this:
$0
$0
$0 $0 $0

kinda sounds like they're too stupid/lazy to manage. i mean that's really specific and perfectly illustrates what you need

Then they were saying on their screen they can only fill in 4 lines so I asked can they list it like this:
$200
-$200

But they're saying they're so confused and I'm just:

maybe say "put all positive amounts in one row, all negative amounts in another"?

i dunno, i mean what you're saying is so very clear . . .

I thought I was too, but I've been told I can be hard when talking about numbers over text so I was trying to be super clear

i mean, it makes sense to me? but i also deal with financials so separating the payments/refunds would be automatic to me?

If that's not too hard to understand then I think they're either messing with me or are lazy

i think lazy hinestly

honestly

This person is a team member and works in accounting with me. I don't feel like this should be so confusing. And honestly it would be easier if I just did this, but I'm trying to use this as a teaching moment so if this happens in the future they know what to do.

And this isn't even the first time I've asked the to do this. Happens about once every 3-5 weeks

Usually they just take it back and fix it. So maybe they have something else going on. I don't know.

yeah if they do financials it's OBVIOUS you need to separate the damn numbers otherwise you just have zeroes!

Yeah, I'm constantly telling her she can't have 0s.

I thought giving a number example would help but I don't know. Just... /head in hands

It would help a reasonable person