What was the total on the Adv Invoice when it was printed? Does that amount show in the Inv Tracker?
Were the Misc Charges on the order line that the Adv Inv was made against, or manually added to the Adv Inv? And what Frequency (First/Every/Last) was selected?
Was a cash receipt made against the Adv Invoice, prior to the shipment or Ship Invoice?
Was a Shipment against the order ever made? Was the line shipped complete (required to trigger a Misc Charge with a frequency of “LAST”)?
It kind of makes sense that the Misc Charges are not automatically added to the Inv, as Misc Charges require a shipment. And no shipment had been made yet (else you wouldn’t need an Adv Inv, duh!)
Oh, it is. But I want the advance billing line to be (11,700) so that the shipment invoice is zero.
The goal is to advance-bill the line AND advance-bill the charges. But I think the moral is that you should not itemize the charges on an advance bill. Apparently you are supposed to simply tally it up on a scrap piece of paper and then key in the line total as the line base amount and apply no misc charges to the advance billing invoice.
My thought on rectifying this (as this really happened, of course):
Delete the misc. charges off of the shipment invoice. The end.
We already got the payment (IRL) for the advance billing of the full amount.
We already charged the misc charges, debiting and crediting where needed.
A SHP invoice with no misc charges will equal the adv. billing balance for the line.
Deferred revenue account nets out.
I think we are done here.
*Ugh - I’m not done. EDIT: I do still want to report this to support. I find this confusing to say the least, and I imagine I am not alone. So I shall update if I hear back…
Edit 2: I guess that’s what they are telling me here:
Jason,
Have you tried your test with a deposit invoice instead of Advance Billing? The advanced billing is specific to the line, whereas the deposit invoice is against a total sales order.
The issue I would see with changing the line to the full 11,700 in your case would be if that misc. charge should be going to a different GL than the product group (e.g. engineering fee or expediting rather than product sales).
I like the flexibility of deposit invoices compared to advanced billing. If an order line changes after having an advanced billing against it there can be more work than if you just use a deposit invoice at the order level.
No, sure have not. I don’t know the difference, honestly, so I’ll have to read up on that. It’s just what they use here, the advance billing.
I appreciate the advice. There are tons of things like that here, where people use a part of Epicor because they tried it years ago and it worked for what they needed and no one ever reevaluated if there was a better approach.
I did put in a ticket and they said working as planned (I get it, really) and to submit it to Ideas, so I did.
I’ll say, though, what occurred to me in all of this is how clunky the process is anyway. Like, why is there not a wizard to create the advance billing for you from the sales order? That’s the idea I should submit. They have a nice wizard for “cancellation invoice.” Something like that.
Deposit billing looks identical to advance billing. Debits and credits basically the same, but the revenue account is/can be different.
After some research, I do understand the key differences:
DEP is for the whole order (you cannot break down by lines)
ADV is for line by line (you cannot do the whole order)
DEP has a nifty wizard option if done from Cash Receipt Entry
DEP will go in the negative if you don’t ship the entire order at once and you cannot do anything about that (holy mackerel that’s awful!)
So, not a fan already. But even still, misc charges are apparently a bad idea on a DEP invoice as well, as it functions the same as the ADV invoice. Or I guess it’s not a “bad” idea if you don’t also put those charges on the sales order (or if you delete them from any shipments).
I mean, I’m not married to the misc charge idea or anything. I’m just trying to understand all the details.
