Sources of Receivables

Sales Invoices

The majority of your company's receivables will come from sales orders that have been processed into sales invoices. These invoices represent goods that have been shipped to your customer, as well as any services that you may have performed for them, and all related fees and charges.

Summary Billing

Summary Billing is an optional step in the invoicing process. Some companies choose to ship goods to their customers throughout any given period and then send a single bill at the end of that period. This is typically done on a month-by-month basis.

When a customer is configured to receive summary bills, their individual invoices will not appear in the Customer Payments interface. Rather, you will use the Summary Billing interface to create the summary invoice. That invoice will then appear as a single invoice in the Customer Payment interface.

Manual AR Documents

Occasionally, you may need to charge your customer for something not related to goods or services. You can use this interface to generate a charge to your customer that will then appear in the Customer Payment interface.

Monthly Finance Charges

Some companies choose to generates finances charges for customers that have open invoices that are older than 30 days. Use this optional step to generate a charge to your customer that will then appear in the Customer Payment interface.

Customer Payments

Once your customer has received their invoice(s) or charge(s), they will eventually send you a payment or give you payment information. You capture this information in the Customer Payments interface. Once you've indicated which customer the payment is coming from, the system will show you all posted invoices, and charges, that are available for payment. You can then choose which ones are paid, award discounts (if the invoice terms allow), and write-off small underpayments when necessary.

Once you've selected the invoices that are to be paid, you post the payment. If the customer has overpaid their bill, any remaining balance will be put on their account as a credit.

At this point in the process, the payment has been received, but the funds may or may not yet be in your bank account. In the general ledger, Acclamare handles this by reducing your balance in Accounts Receivable and increase the balance in an account called Undeposited Funds. The funds will be placed in your Cash account in the next step.

Bank Deposits

This is a mandatory step. Once the customers invoice has been paid, you must actually deposit the funds in your bank account. In this step, you identify the bank account that the funds will be deposited into and select the payments that have been entered in the previous step.

Once this step is completed, the invoice will be marked as "Paid" if it has no remaining balance. In this case, the accounts receivable process is complete in regards to this invoice. If, however, the invoice still has a balance, the invoice will be marked as "Partially Paid" and the process starts over at the payment step.

This step also makes changes in the general ledger. The balance of Undeposited Funds is decreased based on the payment amount, and the balance of your Cash account is increased.

Optional or As-Needed Processes

Making Adjustments

AR Adjustments

This area can be used to make changes to the balance of open invoices and charges. You can make changes to a document that hasn't been paid at all prior to Customer Payments. You can also make changes to documents that have had a partial payment made to them.

Tax Adjustments

This area can be used to make changes to the taxes on an open invoice. This is typically done when an invoice was taxed and should not have been, or vice versa.

Customer Collections

Occasionally, you may have a customer or customers that fail to pay their bill. This area can be used to identify customers that have outstanding late invoices, contact them, and record details of when you should expect payment.