Administration, Core Financials, and Project Accounting

[DGill]

Our Controller was explaining to me the other day that in order to be able to provide a check refund to a customer from a sales return, he has to set up the customer as a vendor to cut the check.  Seems kind of crazy for a very common business need yet I am not seeing how you could do it otherwise (hopefully I am missing something).  I see there is a field on Maintain Customers>Defaults tab labeled 'Allow Refunds' but it appears to always be disabled and looking at the source code, I don't see what would drive it to be enabled.

1) Is anyone else using MAS500 to create check refunds against customer sales in a different manner?

2) What is the story behind this 'Allow Refunds' flag?

3) If MAS500 does not have any means to handle this, does anyone have any experience with a third party module that handles this?

Thanks in advance for any information. 

[rsisk101]

Looks like the AllowRefunds was put there for future use but hasn't been used yet according to the Schema Browser. I searched the code and agree with your conclusion that not much is being done with the field.

We are developing customer refunds for 7.4, building on the refund process we started with Credit Card Refunds in 7.3. So we will be using the AllowRefunds flag at that point. The plan is to allow refund checks to be printed from Accounts Receivable.

If you have any thoughts regarding the AR Refund process, I would love to hear them. 

Message Edited by rsisk101 on 10-29-2009 10:30 AM

[DGill]

Thank you for the clarification.  Now the loaded question.  Is there an estimate on when 7.4 will be released?  I realize that 7.3 has not even been released yet so 7.4 is a ways down the road, it is just that we are meeting now as a company to determine the best way to address this issue and we will most likely be pursuing a custom solution or wait for 7.4.  We still may be going with a custom solution as the stake holders are very interested in consolidating some of the return steps and wrapping it in a workflow which provides for approvals.

Regarding thoughts, after we have met a few more times to discuss our needs, I will try to post back to this thread.

[SHulme]

In general, we try to keep to a 12 - 18 month release cycle. According to customer feedback this schedule provides a proper balance between the need for new and improved features and the willingness to undertake the time and effort required to implement a new release.

Assuming all the necessary caveats, this puts expected delivery of the next release of MAS 500 in mid-2011.

Hope this helps,

[ahuang]

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rsisk101 wrote:

We are developing customer refunds for 7.4, building on the refund process we started with Credit Card Refunds in 7.3. So we will be using the AllowRefunds flag at that point. The plan is to allow refund checks to be printed from Accounts Receivable.

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That is great to hear! Would have loved to see it in 7.3 because the credit card refunds was a great addition but better late than never!

DGill: I know there are 3rd party add ons out there but the only one I am familiar with still creates a vendor and does it through AP.

What we have done is instead of creating a new vendor for every customer that requires a refund we created a global 'Customer Refund' vendor which is used by all customers and then when they have to create a voucher populate the Remit To address with the customer address information and modified the cheque form to print out the correct customer ID.

[ChristineMarshal]

We had a big problem with this when we started using MAS 500.  This is how we handled it.

G/L:  Set up an account for "Customer Refunds".  We used 2470.

A/P:  Set up the following Vendors:  Refund AMEX, Refund Visa/Mastercard/Discover, Refund Check, Refund Cash - this way you can distinguish how the refund was given and it also helps with month end reconciliation.

The Process to generate a customer credit:

A/R side:  A debit memo needs to be created to wash out the CM or overpayment.  There is no item for this transaction, next to item a comment describing the refund such as "refund to visa for CM#, is helpful for history.  No sales tax is necessary for this transaction.  Under GL account, enter the GL account you # set up for customer refunds.

A/P side:  Process a manual check using the CM# as your check number.  Your vendor will be the Refund type.  (amex, check, etc.).  Create a "voucher on the fly".  If refund is a check and you need to change who the check i payable to, you can change the "remit to" for the correct payee.  In the description, enter information such as the customer who received the refund for tracking purposes.  Again, the GL account will be "refund to customer".

It is a tedious process, but unfortunately the only way we found to keep our bookkeeping straight when it comes to returns.  It would be nice if Sage came up with an easier process. 

If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them for you.