Cleaning up AP documents which sum to zero:

It amazes me to see a client’s Accounts Payable report and see the number of vendors who have zero balances showing up on this report; for some very old transactions. One explanation, I believe, is that the training for the current AP person was incomplete; which is many times the case when the old AP clerk trains the new AP clerk. Something obviously fell through the cracks.

This situation occurs because when you processed the Debit Adjustment, it was treated as a credit amount to the vendor’s account. No linkage activities to processes were accomplished when the original debit adjustment was made (note: see article Using Debit Adjustments for more information).

The trick is to process what I call the “zero amount check”. The zero amount check can either be created as a manual check or through the normal payment selection process, and in both cases, all unlinked documents (Vo, ac, and ad) must be selected. In the above example we must select documents both reference numbers 000095 and 000096. Here is an example of selecting both documents via the manual check screen. Note here that we can use a “made up” check number, because the amount on this check is $0.

Please note that the two documents selected in the grid area both display in the amounts column positive values (ie $100). But because one transaction is a Voucher and the other is Debit Adjustment, they net together for a $0 total balance.

When this manual check is released, you will see that check number 000045 linked both transactions together, and at the close of the current AP period, all transactions will be purged from next months Detail AP aging reports.

So just like when we process a check for paying outstanding Vouchers, the check is linked to the voucher and the document balance on the voucher is reduced. In this case, the document balance is reduced to zero dollars, hence these transactions will be dropped from future AP detailed aging reports.

If you are choosing to use manual zero balance checks, it is a good practice to set it to a very low, never used AP check number. This best practice is recommended because Solomon is typically set up to track for duplicate check numbers. Hence if you choose a very high check number, this high check number will typically be incremented by one and presented as the next check number in the check printing screen. Consequently, you are forced to manually enter the correct computer check number prior to doing a check run.