Tip of the Month for: November 2012

Cash Posting Offers 5 new features in version 4.3

In Answers 4.3, Cash Posting has been enhanced with 5 new distinct features to help out in areas of the program that users felt would make it easier to use and cut down on the number of steps required to handle certain out of the ordinary transactions.

(1) Voiding is now allowed on Unapplied Payments that were applied to other invoices.  Cash Posting has always allowed voiding Unapplied Payments, but only if they have not yet been applied to other invoices.  But now, the transactions where these have been applied to invoices can first be voided and then if desired, the entire Unapplied Payment can be voided or it can be left out as Unapplied just like it was before.

(2) Under-payments can now be handled without having to use an Additional Credit type thus freeing Additional Credits for other things such as tax and freight write-offs.  (a) One way to handle an Under-Payment is when all money has been applied to the last invoice  and you are prompted to leave the customer.  You are now prompted with 4 options whereas in the past, you only had 2 options (to remain in the customer or to exit the customer).  While these 2 options remain you can now also undo the last transaction that left an amount outstanding on the last invoice or this is where you can record an Under-Payment Adjustment.  (b) You can also record an Under-Payment Adjustment in the Override window while applying money to an invoice.

(3) Over-Payments can now be handled much easier than having to go through the 2-step process of leaving the overage amount as unapplied and then having to go write off the overage in Reversing Entries.  Now, there is an [Overpaid] button that will handle all of this for you.  The overage is immediately placed on the account like before, but then immediately written off just like you used to do manually through  Reversing Entries.

(4) Pre-Payments allow a way to record a payment in advance of an order being invoiced from Order Entry.  When a pre-payment is entered you are prompted for the sales order # or a search is available.  Then when the order is eventually invoiced, the pre-payment (which has been open on the account like an open credit - only denoted as a pre-payment) will automatically be applied to the invoice.  This is handy when you want to go ahead and post a payment prior to the invoice being updated into the system by the Order Processing Invoice Registers.

(5) Tax Adjustments. In addition to be able to write off sales tax like you have been able to do in the past with Additional Credits, you  can now right click on an invoice and add, change or remove sales tax.  This includes making taxable invoices non-taxable or non-taxable invoices taxable.  It also includes just changing a portion of the invoice from taxable to non-taxable or from non-taxable to taxable.  As with Sales Tax write-offs, not only is the customer's invoice updated, but so is G/L, Sales Tax Reporting, and the Sales Tax Adjustment Audit.  In addition this feature also updates Invoice History in case the invoice is updated so that if it is later re-printed or viewed, it will reflect whatever change was made to sales tax.

We strongly encourage you to review these new Cash Posting related features in detail in the Version 4.3 Release Notice and begin taking advantage of them to cut down on your effort of handling some of these various issues that arise while posting customer payments.