ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE

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Now that we have taken orders and shipped products to our customers, we need to bill our customers for those products, monitor what they owe us, and document their payments to us.

When you post an order, an accounts receivable entry is created in the system. After creating orders in the system, you can view invoices due from any given customer using the A/R Inquiry (Figure 101) found under both Accounting Accounts Receivable A/R Inquiry and Inquiries A/R Inquiry.

By entering the Account Number of the customer you wish to review, you populate the grid with all invoices that are still open (unpaid). If you wish to view invoices that have been paid as well, you select the Include Closed Transactions checkbox and enter a date in the Starting From field to view all paid invoices from that date forward as well as all open invoices (Figure 102). Note payments are also displayed as separate line-items when the Include Closed Transactions checkbox is selected.

The A/R Inquiry also allows you to “drill down” and obtain more detail about the transactions it displays. Double clicking on a row in the grid which displays an invoice brings up the Order Review form which gives you the detail of the invoice (Figure 103). Double clicking on a row displaying a payment brings up the Payment Review form which gives you a breakdown of the payment (Figure 104).

If you want a hardcopy of the A/R Inquiry, click the Print button to print the inquiry. When you are finished viewing the inquiry, clicking the Done button will clear the form.

In addition to the A/R Inquiry, we can print an accounts receivable aging report to give us a clearer picture of past due invoices. The A/R Aging report is found under Reports A/R Reports A/R Aging. You can run the A/R Aging report for one customer or for a range of customers, or you can run it for customers assigned to a specified salesperson. You can also indicate that you want the report to include only those invoices that are older than a specified number of days. The report can be run in Summary (Figure 105) or in Detail (Figure 106). Like the A/R Inquiry, the detailed A/R Aging report can also be configured to display paid invoices and payments by selecting the Closed Transactions checkbox on the A/R Aging print-setup form.

As part of the billing process, you will want to send your customers periodic statements showing the activity in their account. The Customer Statement report (Figure 107) can be accessed under Reports A/R Reports Customer Statements. After selecting a closing date, the print setup form for Customer Statements allows you to Print All Accounts or to Print Selected Accounts. If you choose to Print All Accounts, you can then specify whether you want to, in fact, print statements for all the customers in your system or you can print statements for a category of customers based on the frequency of statements. You might remember that back in Section II K, when we were setting up customers using the Customer File Maintenance form, we determined each customer’s Statement Frequency on the Billing tab. Each customer was assigned a Statement Frequency of Daily, Weekly, Semi-Monthly, Monthly, or None. Now, when you select the Print All Accounts option on the print setup form for the Customer Statements report, you can choose to print only those customers with a certain Statement Frequency (e.g., Semi-Monthly), or you can select All to print all customers.

If you instead select the Print Selected Accounts option, you then enter the customer account numbers for those customer whose statements you want to print in the grid in the lower half of the print setup form.

You can also assess finance charges at this point, while printing statements for your customers. If you select the Apply Finance Charges checkbox before printing the statements, The Application will calculate finance charges due on outstanding invoices, create an invoice for those charges, and print the finance charges due on the statement.

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Order Entry

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Cash Receipts