I have been asked to explore the possibilities of delaying invoice creation for shipments to once or twice a month for certain customers.
The goal is to allow items to leave our facilities when they are ready, but have the customer receive 1 invoice for all items at the end of the month for example. Management doesn’t want the admins creating the invoice group to have to skip these shipments and they don’t want our A/R person to have to separate these invoices into another group before they post the previous days group the following day. Ultimately, they want the shipments to be hidden until its time for invoice creation, or they want the invoice automatically created.
I’ve searched through the forums and the help file and didn’t see anything that would help. Is this something that would need to go to CSG due to the complexity?
Just a couple of thoughts, each with their own drawbacks:
Post Date (possibly by BPM) the ship date for packs for these customers. Get Shipments in AR Invoice Entry won’t pick them up until it reaches that date (I think). Downside - ship dates are no longer real.
Don’t mark them as Shipped (a.k.a. Ready To Invoice) until they are really ready to invoice. Downside - more maintenance, plus SO’s stay open while waiting.
Create a some kind of filter in the Get Shipments box in AR Invoice Entry. If you have a limited number of customers, you might create a BAQ Search for the customer filter that includes all EXCEPT these customers. That would allow you to select all shipments matching the customer filter. Downside - If you have a lot of customers, a Customer filter might break down. Plus, it’s a few extra steps during invoicing.
That’s my “slightly less complicated” suggestions to get this done. If you want it fully automatic, then it’ll take more research.
Use the “Billing Day” and “Consolidate Packing Slips” options in the Customer Entry. Both are on the Billing -> Detail sheet.
From the Help …
Billing Day
Indicates the day of the week or month on which this customer is billed. Select a day from this list if you ship product every day, but only invoice customers on specific day of the week/month. Within AR Invoice Entry, this day is used by the Get > Shipments command; the Billing Day determines which shipments to pull for billing.
Note that the default is All Days. This means that when you run the Get > Shipments command, all of this customer’s packing slips are pulled when you run the Get > Shipments command; it does not filter these shipments by date.
After some testing, the rest of the story came out and they want monthly billing for the entire company, not just an individual customer.
We repair items for the Cable Industry, so there are lots and lots of physical locations each setup with their own unique Customer ID, but all the invoices go to corporate. We have National Accounts setup for the Parent and have tied all the locations to it. Is there a way to generate one invoice for the entire month for the National Account that would include all shipments to each child Customer ID?
Have you attempted using the combine sales order, combine packing slips, and consolidate shipping lines on the customers? Seems like that should merge all shipments into one invoice…and set the billing day and frequncy to monthly
We currently use Combine Sales Orders, and Consolidate Pack Slips. So, for example, we would get one invoice for Customer 1, one invoice for Customer 2, even though they would both be children of Parent Customer ABC.