Accounts Receivable

Accounts Receivable is a comprehensive module designed to manage accounts receivable in a wide variety of environments including wholesale, retail, service, project management and manufacturing.

Accounts Receivable is fully integrated with General Ledger and Sale Order. All sales transactions are automatically processed to Accounts Receivable with real-time postings to the general ledger.

PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable functionalities include:

• Ageing by 7-day, 14-day, monthly or user-defined categories;
• Flexible invoicing, tax options and charges;
• Powerful sales analysis, including enquiries, reports and budgeting;
• Comprehensive cash receipting for both local and foreign values;
• Automatic or manual cash allocation and full banking slips;
• Part payments, retentions and credit claims;
• Foreign currency, including loss/gain handling;
• Support for foreign currency customer accounts;
• Extensive bank reconciliation functionality;
• Debt ageing, analysis and credit management;
• Head office and branch accounts.

Customer Maintenance

The customer maintenance screen captures customer information which is used as default data in PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable and other modules. You can maintain very detailed information about the customer, including contacts, email addresses, banking information, currency, licensing details, warranty administration, multiple delivery addresses, delivery instructions and much more.

This centralised control of your customer data is the trigger to operational efficiency and sound financial management.

Ship To and Bill To

You can use Accounts Receivable to set up and maintain head office and branch accounts. Sales may be held against, and shipped to, a branch account, while being billed to a head office account. You can use special pricing arrangements defined for the head office account, or define special pricing arrangements that are specific to a branch account.

Credit Limit

Credit limits can be defined for each customer. If a customer’s total of outstanding invoices and sales orders exceeds their credit limit, you can automatically place new sales orders on credit hold. Once on hold these orders can only be released by an authorised credit officer. Each credit officer has a defined limit for order amounts they can release. A customer’s credit can also be controlled by the age of outstanding invoices. For example, if the customer is under the specified credit limit but has unpaid accounts greater than 60 days, new orders can be placed on credit hold. A customer’s account can also be manually placed on credit hold by changing the account status to ‘No Supply’.

Additional holds can be placed on sales orders if the gross margin of the order is below a defined percentage.

Settlement Discount

You can define the amount of settlement discount for each customer. A user-defined table sets out the percentage discount allowed based on the number of days from the invoice date, number of days from the end of month, or based on a specified cut-off date.

Security Functions

Accounts Receivable can mask users so they only have access to customers in specified territories.

For example, you can give a state manager access to all territories, but limit the sales representatives to their respective territories.

More Customer Information

Default sales order information such as despatch warehouse, sales representative, territory, applicable tax and price level is defined by the customer master file. You can override these default parameters during sales order entry. These defaults also define the reporting structure.

Additionally, the customer master file captures all the customer preferences or rules, such as:

• Send invoice with goods;
• No statement required;
• Purchase order required;
• Whether interest is to be charged on overdue accounts;
• Customer allows part shipments;
• How backorders are handled;
• Backorder release priority;
• Customised layouts for invoices, statements etc.

Full Enquiry Functions

As well as viewing the full details of the customer master file and current transactions, you can interrogate the customer’s file for ageing analysis, product sales history, sales orders, outstanding invoices, current inventory exposure, historical transactions, licenses or permits, complaints, delivery addresses, instructions, etc.

PRONTO Xi provides immediate access to current and historical sales orders and transactions through enquiry screens and reports.

Account Conversions

You can convert a customer’s account code to a new code, which is useful if the account code is based on a name and it is changed. If a customer’s business is taken over by another customer, you can merge the accounts.

You can convert a customer’s territory and/or representative along with any history. All customers of a sales representative can be converted to another representative. This function is also available to convert all customers of one territory to another territory.

Customer Pricing, Discounts, Promotions and Rebates

PRONTO Xi pricing structures can be tailored for each customer account or bill-to. The sell price is determined by a combination of customer and item attributes such as pricing levels, contract, territory, warehouse, customer group, product class, product type and item group.

The same degree of functionality is available for discounts, promotions and rebates.

Budget and Forecast Maintenance

Accounts Receivable allows you to set up and maintain sales budgets, quotas, targets and forecasts for customers, sales representatives, territories, product groups and products.

You can manually enter budgets for each period of the year, or you can use spread factors to apportion the total annual amount based on a relative weighting or ratio. Spread factors make allowances for equal period activities, seasonal fluctuations and other known factors that affect company sales across the year. PRONTO Xi includes reports to compare budgets with actual results.

Invoices and Credit Notes.

If your company follows a straightforward order process for sales, you can use PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable for simplified order processing. For example, you can take an order, create an invoice and post it to the customer. In this case, inventory items do not need to be created; you can use a special descriptive line to record the sales information.

Where you are invoicing a customer for a non-stock item (eg recovery of expenses or miscellaneous revenue), the manual invoice can be allocated to the appropriate general ledger account or accounts.

Cash Receipting

The cash receipting function provides a variety of allocation methods. For instance, cash receipts may be automatically or manually marked off against invoices. You could also use one receipt to pay invoices from more than one customer account, or you could leave a receipt unallocated and mark it off against another invoice at a future date.

Accounts Receivable allows the processing of foreign currency values, including bank charges associated with the receipt of foreign currency. PRONTO Xi will calculate and post any exchange gain or loss associated with the transaction. Based on a global tolerance amount you set, PRONTO Xi will automatically write off the difference of short payments to a predefined general ledger account.

Accounts Receivable caters for dishonoured cheques and the automatic write-back of related transactions. Bank charges may be taken up in the general ledger or charged back to the customer. You can also print and reprint bank deposit (pay-in) slips. A bank audit report is also produced. Customer receipting, matching to invoices and other transactions can also be undertaken in the bank reconciliation programs.

Receipts formats

PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable supports receipt types in the form of cash, cheque, transfer, credit cards, EFT integration, drafts and BPay.

Custom receipt types (tender types) can be defined, and attributes, such as validation and size of numbers, can be selected to suit your business.

Receipts In the form of credit card payments (AMEX, Diners Club, Visa, MasterCard, etc) can include commissions payable to credit companies as well as allowing for non-banking of the receipt until such time as the credit card company has honoured the charge. Integrated audit of changes to key data. Who, what and when is captured automatically and tools are provided to view and manage the audit data.

The major transaction processes assign a tracking ID to events. Key enquiries provide the ability to drill back or forward through the various sub-ledgers to view related postings. A sales order can be traced through inventory, customer or the general ledger and all of its transactions viewed.

Accounts Receivable Journals

PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable supports the transfer of transactions via journal from one customer account to another. If you are using multiple accounts receivable control accounts, these transactions are only reflected in the general ledger if they represent activity in different control accounts. The net overall value of the accounts receivable ledger is not changed for these journals.

When a company is both a customer and a supplier, values held against the customer account may have contra transactions posted against that company’s supplier account.

You can write-off specific transactions as bad debts when required. PRONTO Xi automatically adjusts consumer taxes for bad debts.

Customer general ledger journals are also provided to allow direct allocation of amounts between general ledger accounts and customers. This function is often used for recharge of expenses.

Special Sales Features

Accounts Receivable provides a number of features for specialised industries and sales order processing. These include:

• Licensing permits that need to be held to purchase certain products (eg tobacco or liquor). Reports may be produced to reflect these details;
• Printing a customer’s item number on the invoice where their item number for a particular item is different from yours;
• Allowing only specified customers to buy certain products. This is particularly useful if you sell a line of merchandise exclusively to a customer;
• Customer backorder policy indicates whether or not a customer accepts backorders and how these backorders are handled;
• Customer partial shipment handling may be defined to control how this is processed;
• Different form layouts where required by customers (eg invoices or statements);
• Order surcharge (fixed percentage or dollar amount for orders below minimum value);
• Mandatory input of customer purchase order number (reference) in order entry;
• ‘Use by date’ (minimum acceptable shelf life of a product) defined by customer;
• Pallet and picking configurations can be maintained.

Admin/Credit Officer Function

Credit officers may be responsible for debt collection, as well as controlling the level of credit to be extended to individual customers. The credit officer can place a customer on ‘No Supply’ until the customer pays their account, and subsequently override the ‘No Supply’ flag to release all or specific suspended orders. The credit officer functions of Accounts Receivable include sending out overdue letters to customers and charging interest on overdue accounts.

Orders that exceed credit limits for customers can automatically be placed on hold. Once they are on credit hold a credit officer must release them before they can be processed further. Each credit officer has value limits to control the amount they are able to release for a customer, and the value of individual credit notes they can authorise. Credit officers may be assigned to all or specific groups of customers and may also receive email when an order is placed on hold.

Sales Representative Commissions

You can pay commissions to sales representatives based on sliding scales including bonuses and penalties. This permits the payment of a percentage for sales up to the nominated value and a different commission for sales above this value. Special commission rates can be set for specific item groups. There may be up to five sale commission breaks.

You can encourage sales representatives to collect on outstanding debts from customers by offering bonuses on prompt payments, and discourage sales representatives from offering discounts to customers by imposing penalties on levels of discount.

Retail Promotions

Retail Promotions forms part of PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable. The feature provides functionality for managing and tracking promotions, related expenses and claims in dealing with retailers.

PRONTO Xi captures promotion history at the transaction level for full reporting and powerful summary analysis of the promotion.

The functionality of Retail Promotions includes:

• User-defined promotions and expenses (eg deferred or off invoice);
• Integration with PRONTO Xi Sales Orders, General Ledger and Customer Rebates;
• Accrual of deferred expenses and rebates in PRONTO Xi General Ledger, and review of these against the promotion and customer;
• Options for how the promotion affects sales history and cost of goods sold;
• Promotion status – active, on-hold, closed, etc;
• Promotion start and end date;
• Promotions established by customer and product, or customer and item group;
• Use of rebate rules.

Reports

There are numerous standard sales reports, which report performance by customer, territory, sales representative, product and item group, and provide comparison of budgets with actuals.

PRONTO Xi offers report writing tools and an extensive range of reports. These reports have selection criteria to deliver the most appropriate information for your organisation. Some of the reports available in PRONTO Xi Accounts Receivable include:

• Trial Balance, Aged Balance;
• Overdue/Outstanding Invoices;
• Customer Transactions and Statements;
• Invoice Register;
• Over Credit Limits;
• Customer Price/Discount;
• Payment Statistics;
• Credit Note Analysis;
• Transaction Summary;
• Foreign Currency Exposure;
• Payment Statistics;
• Tax Adjustment Notes for Australian GST.