About Accounts Receivable Customers
When you set up Accounts Receivable, you must transfer all of your existing customer information to Sage 300.
General Customer Information
You use the A/R Customers screen to transfer most of your customer information to Accounts Receivable, and to maintain information about your customers after setup. More...
You can record background information for the customer, such as:
- The customer number (the code you use to identify the account).
For more information, see About Customer Numbers.
- The customer's name, billing address, and phone numbers.
- An optional "short name," an abbreviation or acronym that represents the customer.
For more information, see About Short Names.
- Credit information, including a credit rating and a credit limit.
For more information, see About Customer Credit Information and Credit Limits.
- The names of the salespeople assigned to the account, and the percentage of the customer's transactions you allocate to each salesperson.
- A delivery method to use for sending invoices, statements, receipt confirmations, and letters to the customer. (If you choose Customer as the Delivery Method when printing invoices, statements, and letters, the program uses the delivery method specified in the customer record.)
- The shipping details (FOB point and ship via details) for the customer.
For more information, see A/R Customers Screen.
- Comments, instructions, or other information you want to print on correspondence with the customer, display during transaction entry, or keep for other purposes.
For more information, see About Customer Comments.
- The date on which you started to do business with the customer.
- Whether you print statements for the customer when the account is overdue.
- If you use optional fields, any additional information your company wants to include in optional fields you set up for use with customer records.
Any customer optional fields set up for automatic insertion appear automatically, along with their default values, on the Optional Fields tab of new customer records.
For more information, see About Customer Optional Fields
- The customer group and national account, if any, to which the customer belongs.
Transaction Processing Information
You also use the A/R Customers screen to identify the ways in which you process transactions for each customer. More...
Processing information includes the following:
- Account type (balance forward or open item). This choice indicates whether you apply receipts to the account balance, or treat each transaction as a unique document, and apply receipts to specific document numbers.
For more information, see About Customer Account Types.
- Account set. The account set is the group of general ledger accounts to which the customer's transactions are distributed. Each set includes accounts for receivables control, receipt discounts, prepayment liability, and write-offs.
If you use multicurrency accounting, the account set also includes unrealized and realized exchange gain and loss accounts.
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Payment terms. You specify a code for the terms you usually allow the customer. Accounts Receivable uses terms information to determine the default due date, discount period, and discount amount to display when you enter invoices for the customer.
For more information, see About Customer Tax Information.
- Interest profile. You specify the method used to calculate the amount of interest to charge when the customer's account is overdue.
For more information, see About Interest Profiles.
- If you use Payment Processing, you can specify the credit cards you will use to process credit card transactions for the customer in Paya.
For more information, see Adding, Editing, or Deleting a Credit Card for a Customer.
- Tax group, tax authority, tax class, and registration number. If the customer is subject to tax, this information tells Accounts Receivable how to calculate tax amounts on the customer's invoices.
For more information, see About Customer Tax Information.
Keeping and Editing Customer Statistics
In addition to the information you enter for each customer, Accounts Receivable automatically adds the statistics it collects from all transactions posted to each customer account.
If you use the Allow Edit Of (customer) Statistics option on the A/R Options screen, you can also enter these figures when you are setting up a new Accounts Receivable system, and revise them as needed.
For more information, see About Customer Statistics.
Placing a Customer Account On Hold
You can place a customer account on hold when you want to suspend the account temporarily.
Accounts Receivable warns you when you start to enter an invoice for a customer whose account is on hold. You can then choose whether to continue entering the invoice.
You can always enter and post invoices, credit notes, debit notes, payments, and prepayments, whether a customer account is on hold or not. However, Accounts Receivable does not process recurring charges for customers whose records are on hold.
If you place a national account on hold, you also see a warning when you enter an invoice for a customer in the national account.
You can place individual customers in a national account on hold, without placing the entire national account on hold.
Assigning Inactive Status
You can mark a customer account as inactive by selecting the Inactive option in the customer record.
Note: You can assign this status to a customer only when the account has a zero balance and no outstanding transactions.
When a customer account is inactive, you cannot post further transactions to the account, but you can retain the account in your Accounts Receivable system for as long as you need to keep it. When you are ready to remove the account, you can use the Delete Inactive Records screen or the Customers screen to delete the account.
You can assign Inactive status to member customers in a national account without making the entire national account inactive. If a national account is inactive, however, all of its customers are inactive as well, and you cannot post transactions to any of the accounts or make changes to customer records in the national account.
Using Multiple Addresses for a Customer
If you need to keep more than one address for a customer, such as when you send the customer's orders to more than one location, you can define as many additional addresses as you need using the Ship-To Locations screen.
You can also designate a primary ship-to location to use as the default when you set up recurring charges or create invoices for the customer. Order Entry (if you use it) also uses these details as defaults when you create an order for the customer.
For more information, see About Ship-To Locations
Creating Records to Invoice Recurring Charges
If you regularly invoice the customer for the same order, such as monthly rent, you can create recurring charge records, using the A/R Recurring Charges screen.
For more information, see About Recurring Charges.)
Importing Customer Records
You can import customer records into Accounts Receivable from non-Sage 300 programs, instead of entering them in the Customers screen.
For information, see About Importing and Exporting Accounts Receivable Records.