Core Financial Modules

[Pappy]

Afternoon All!

Since we have the extended solution: AR1068 (National Accounts), we chose to create internal parent accounts that represent different reasons for zero-dollar invoices.  These are orders that we are eating/paying-for the freight due to missing items (either from not being picked, or from an order not being created properly), or orders that were damaged while in-transit.

• MISSING
  
  1. Not picked & packed: Items are shown as comment-lines since they were already pulled from inventory.
  2. Sales-Rep Goofed: Items that should have been on the order, but did not make it due to misconfiguration, or over-

• DAMAGED
  
  1. Items damaged by carrier: They are entered into a new SO, price is set to $0.00.
     
     • This way we can use that invoice to send to the carrier for the claim

We are looking to add two new parent accounts as well: WRRNTY & DFCTV (pulled the vowels ... not enough room for full word).

The whole point of these is to make sure that the freight gets assigned internally, and to provide a means of classifying these types of orders; while all along keeping the history associated with the respective customers.

Question:  Does this make sense? I am second-guessing myself right now about adding the two new accounts.

How do others deal with zero-dollar sales/invoices when they have to eat the freight?

[givingtr]

I'd create a UDF on the invoice header. Add all variations of these accounts to a UDT so the UDF can use them on invoice header, and add the UDF to ALE, Explorer or reports.

[Heather]

Pappy -

We don’t have that extended solution, but what you describe seems kind of complicated to me.

As to your final question – any transaction related to a customer is logged against that customer’s account. 

If we wanted a defined reason code added to these invoices, we would implement Mark’s UDF suggestion.  But we don’t care, so we just add comments or memos that explain the situation.

If the customer needs to see evidence of the transaction, then we send him a copy of the invoice.  If he doesn’t, we don’t.

[Pappy]

Hi Heather,

I am glad that you joined in too

I considered a UDF, but ultimately it came down to who gets billed for the freight.  We didn't want to bill the freight to the customers ... So, for a while we used a very generic internal account to get the issue with the original order resolved, and the freight would get paid by us.  The problems was with associating the "issue" with the actual customer; additionally, we didn't want to do a credit-memo for for each freight charge.  So, we decided on using our National Accounts extended solution.  Since we use Sales Logix as well, the customer account there has record of this issue/transaction as well.  It seems to have worked so far: Now we are going from two internal accounts to four.  Maybe it is still the way to go ... I just want to make sure before I allow this idea to grow.

It gets a little more elaborate: We have another internal account that covers issues that buyers of the products that we sell, or distribute, for another manufacturer ... But did not buy from us (we are their designated service-center).  These issues get tracked the same way.  We use the special internal account to record the SO (issue), and then use the one of the other four internal accounts to classify the issue (assuring that the freight get paid by us).

...

I just had to bounce this off you folks ... Sometimes I just get stuck on one track on how to get something done, or coming up with a new method.

Thank You