Tip of the Month for: February 2012

Excluding Invoices or Credit Memos from Customer Statements

Sometimes for various reasons, it is necessary to enter an invoice or a credit memo to a customer that you would rather them not see to keep from confusing them.  For example suppose you forget to change the tax jurisdiction number on an invoice, so you credit it back using the wrong tax jurisdiction and re-bill it using the correct tax jurisdiction number.  This gets your tax reports correct but then if you send the customer a statement they see 2 invoices and 1 credit and can lead to confusion for them.  To assist with scenarios such as this, you can now flag an invoice or credit to be excluded from customer statements.  This is useful for internal type corrections such as the example outlined above.

This can be done in 2 places.  The first is in Order Entry when initially entering the invoice or credit that you do not want to show up on customer statements.  You can click on the Order Options icon on the toolbar or on Edit-->Order Options from the menu bar and then check on the check box titled "Exclude from Cust Stmt".

The second place is in the Account Analysis tab or window available in programs such as Customer Inquiry or Cash Posting.  You can right click on an invoice or credit line that you want to  exclude and then click on "Exclude from Cust Statements".

The invoices and/or credit memos that are excluded from statements will continue to be displayed and printed as before and processed the same throughout the rest of the system such as Cash Posting, Service Charges, etc., however they will not print on the customer's statement.  Invoices that are excluded from statements will show an asterisk (*) beside them in Account Analysis.

Just keep in mind that if you don't exclude off-setting entries such as an invoice and credit that are equal, that the customer's balance on the statement will be different than what is shown elsewhere in the system.

Also as a bonus hint, one of the reasons that users had to credit and re-bill in the past was if a salesperson # was entered wrong.  Starting with Answers 4.2, you can now change a salesperson # on an invoice from within Customer Inquiry and the Invoice History tab.  For more details on this feature, refer to page 39 of the 4.2 Release Notice.  Therefore, it should no longer be necessary to credit and re-bill for salesperson # mistakes.