Frequently Asked Questions – Accounting and Finance

There are a few places that one can actually go to reverse an invoice transaction.

From the main menu, choose Lists… Accounts Receivable… Invoices… and then type the invoice number.  Once highlighted, press the <Delete> key and then press <Enter>.

You can also highlight the invoice directly from the Customer Care screen and press <Delete> and then <Enter>.

Finally, you can also add a toolbar shortcut item on the main program’s toolbar for quick accessibility.

That depends on the method used for computing the finance charges.  If you use the “New Past Due Invoices” method for finance charges, then it does not really matter when you generate and post finance charges.

However, if you use the compounded finance charge method of “All Unpaid Invoices”,  one should attempt to run finance charges the day after the majority of invoices become past due.  This will ensure that all late paid accounts are calculated as part of the finance charges.

In other words, if your  last billing cycle had generated invoices due by December 10th, then finance charges should be generated on December 11th of that month (or close to it).  If a grace period has been defined in ManageMore, then you should take that into account as well and generate finance charges immediately after the due date plus the grace period.

There are two basic principles in how you can apply finance charges using ManageMore( In some respect, it is similar to the varying methods of how to compute interest on a loan).  The difference between the two methods is in how they qualify the customer invoices that will receive the finance charges.

New Past Due Invoice method computes the customer finance charge by summing all invoice balances that were not satisfied before the invoice due date plus the pre-defined grace period.  This means that invoices with no balance at the time of generating finance charges, could still be calculated in the finance charge equation if the customer failed to make payment on time.  One other aspect to this finance charge method is that it will consider an invoice for finance charge calculation only on time. It does not compound finance charges on the same outstanding invoices that it used on previous finance charge postings.

All Unpaid Invoice method computes the customer finance charge by summing all outstanding invoice balances only that were not satisfied before the invoice due date plus the pre-defined grace period.  This method is sensitive to when you actually post the finance charges because it does not take into account any invoices that were paid late.  Furthermore, this method will re-calculate finance charges over and over again on the same outstanding invoices each time you post finance charges.  It is imperative that you write-off bad debt at some point or the finance charges will continue to compound over the course of time.

Users who have been using ManageMore for some time and decided to generate finance charges for the first time tend to exhibit a large finance charge list.  This is because ManageMore is detecting every invoice that was ever paid late in the past and has not had a finance charge imposed.  This could be hundreds or thousands of invoices from months past that were not charged a finance charge (money you have been losing out on by not billing your customers a late fee in the past).

To correct this situation, a setting exists to ignore all invoices from a certain period back.  This check box setting is on the finance charge criteria window and is labeled “Skip Invoices with due date more than xxx days”.  You will only need to use this setting the first time you generate finance charges.  Subsequently,  ManageMore will keep track of all new current invoices that will require finance charges.

Yes and No.  We recommend that you make a decision early on with grace periods and stick to it.  Changing grace periods in between months while using the “New Past Due Invoice” method of calculating finance charges, can inadvertently cause some customers to get finance charges while others not. Once a customer is late on payment, you cannot successfully alter the grace period in order to trick the finance charge process into skipping the customer account from consideration.

If you must change this value, try to do so immediately after your last posting of finance charges.

Reversing payments create a positive accounts receivable effect on a customer account, while refunding/reversing invoices creates a negative accounts receivable effect.

Basically, reversing a payment should be done when dealing with accounts receivable situations where the invoice balance is needed to be restored to its original state.  Normally, the common reason for reversing a payment would be due to a check with insufficient funds (i.e. a bad/bounced check).  It could also be done if a payment was posted to the wrong account, however, ManageMore has a feature for correcting this data entry problem without having to reverse and repost the payment.

In General, payment reversals should only be done if your goal is to bring the customer account balance back to its original amount.   Reversing payments is mostly a procedural step associated with businesses that produce incidental/recurring billing statements and deal with mailed-in payments.

Since most sales are point-of-sale related (i.e. sales invoice which is paid immediately ), the more common way of partially/fully reversing a customer’s charges is to create a sales refund.   Usually, the customer is requesting some or all payment back on a particular sales invoice.    Refunding an invoice deals creates a credit by internally creating an offsetting transaction.  This gives you the ability of partially or totally crediting an invoice to the customer account or directly paying back the credit due to the customer.  This is quite common for situations when customers return some or all items from a previously generated invoice.  A sales refund also handles any inventory related returns at the time of saving the transaction.

ManageMore can currently interface with QuickBooks® and PeachTree® General Ledger.  ManageMore also provides a simple file export of all journal entries for any given period, that can be read by any accounting package that has ASCII file import capabilities.