Sales Orders (Special Cases)
Since the Sales Order Browse is used for many purposes, it is worthwhile to discuss a couple of special cases you’ll deal with from time to time.
Receiving Payment When Invoicing
You can enter payment for any single invoice directly from the Sales Order browse. This is handy if you need to receive payment at the time of invoicing, for walk-ins and CODs. To do this, press the [Payment] button at the bottom of the Invoices tab. This brings up a browse box with any payments already applied to this invoice. Press the [Insert] button (or press the <Ins> key) to create a new payment entry with this invoice already entered for you.
If you need to edit or delete this payment after saving, you can do so in the A/R|Payments & Credits browse.
Receiving A Prepayment Against An Open Order
You can also use the [Payment] button to enter a payment for any single order before it is invoiced. The payment is posted to cash when it is entered. When you invoice the order, the payment is automatically applied to the invoice. To do this, press the [Payment] button at the bottom of the Invoices tab. Press the [Insert] button (or press the <Ins> key) to create a new payment entry which is automatically linked to the selected sales order.
If you need to edit or delete this payment after saving, you can do so in the A/R|Payments & Credits browse.
Correcting An Invoiced Order
You cannot edit a sales order which has been invoiced. So what do you do if you find that you just printed an invoice and there is a mistake? Simply select the order and clone it! This creates a new order that you can edit. Then print a new invoice with the appropriate corrections. Once you have the corrected invoice, then go back and void the original (incorrect) invoice.
With One Exception! (Editing Line Item Costs)
You can edit the costs of an invoiced entry, even if it was a custom item not drawn from your inventory. You do this by locating the vendor invoice (in the Vendor Invoice browse) generated from the purchase order and editing the costs there. Since you can locate a vendor invoice by the sales orders Order ID field, this is easy to do.) So long as you havent yet paid for the product, you can freely edit the costs. Any changes made to the vendor invoice will automatically update the CoGS on the sales order so your profitability reports will always be correct.
Credit Memos For Returned Goods
You will sometimes need to reverse a posted invoice (sale) because of returned merchandise or because incorrect information was entered. In such cases, you don’t want simply to reverse the customer’s balance, but also to reverse the effects on sales totals for each product, employee and vendor and product type. The only way to do this is to enter another sales order using the same information, but with negative amounts.
To create a credit memo, simply create an order as any other but use a negative SHIP QTY. The total on the invoice will be negative (reflecting the credit due the customer.)
If the customer is returning merchandise you can simply clone the original order from Sales Orders pressing the [Clone] button on the selected invoice or line item. Then change the SHIP QTY for each line item to a negative. This will exactly reverse the original amount with only a few keystrokes. The reversed amount will properly be reflected in all totals for salespeople, A/R, sales totals and A/P. If you are reversing an existing invoice and the original invoice is still open in RECEIVABLES, the CREDIT MEMO window will appear once you save the transaction. This allows you to apply the new credit to the original invoice immediately.
Important Note: If you use the same VENDOR INVOICE # as the original on a custom item, the program will complain during posting that the original invoice has already been posted to A/P. In such cases you should enter a unique number in the VENDOR INVOICE field, post, then delete the generated bill (if necessary) from A/P|Vendor Invoices.
Crediting Sales Tax
A common mistake is billing a non-taxable customer as taxable, or billing a taxable customer as non-taxable. You can simply make the adjustment in the DISCOUNT field when accepting payment in A/R|Customer Payments. There is a problem, though. You cannot change the tax amount field for the posted invoice in sales history. So if you use A/R|Customer Payments to make adjustments these adjustments will not appear on sales history reports.
So the question is how to bill (or credit) the sales tax and adjust sales history without billing (or crediting) inventory, sales history, or anything else. The idea is to create a new sales order (or clone an existing order) with two identical line items; one that is taxable, and the other non-taxable.
Example: If you over-billed for sales tax on an order, clone the order, then go the line item and change the SHIP QTY to the same, but negative value. Then create a second, identical line item with a positive SHIP QTY and change the TAXABLE field to ‘N’.
This creates an order with a 0.00 subtotal, but a negative total and a negative TAX AMOUNT. After posting, use RECEIVABLES|Match Items to apply the credit to the original invoice and mark them both as closed.
If you are not concerned with an over-billing appearing on your sales tax reports, you can simply apply the over-billing as a discount to your sales tax payable account when receiving payment.
Example: If you under-billed for sales tax on an order, clone the order, making certain that the TAXABLE field in the line item is not checked. Then create a second, identical line item with a negative SHIP QTY and check the TAXABLE field.
This will create an order with a 0.00 subtotal, but a positive total and a positive TAX AMOUNT. Print the invoice and post. be certain to put an explanation into the line item so the customer understands the purpose of the bill.
Voided Invoices
Once an invoice is voided it cannot be edited at all. It is made part of the permanent accounting record in order to keep an audit trail of all invoice numbers, however voided invoices do not affect totals for sales, costs or receivables on any reports or in any data files.
When you void an invoice, you have the option to remove any Linked Accounts Payable. This is usually the preferred option. Selecting this option removes all vendor invoices linked to this Sales Order. If a Vendor Invoice consists of line items from multiple Sales Orders all these costs from all lines are removed. It is therefore a good idea to answer No in those cases and edit the payables directly from the A/P Bills Browse.
