Ar cleanup --- a more efficient method

If you are like me, you often find that there are AR customers who own you very small balances (i.e. 25 cents). Such balances might occur from round off, short pay on freight etc. There is an easy way to clean up these balances in Solomon. This trick involves using the AR small balance write off process.

What this AR small balance write off does is creates a credit memo and applies the credit memo to the open document and likes the two. You can clean up multiple errors simultaneously and with little effort.

Here are your steps.

1) Verify with someone who has the appropriate security access to the AR setup screen (08.950) that the option for doing a small balance write up is allowed. Click on the tab called: Customer Defaults.

Note in the bottom left quartile, there is a field called: Allow small balance write-off in payment applications. This feature must be turned on and the maximum write off amount must be entered.

2) make sure you have a backup of your Solomon database, so if necessary you have a recovery option. (Strongly recommended, but not required)

3) Next open the AR screen called Small Balance/ Credit Write off (08.250).

Select in the Type field either a small balance or small credit memo. In this example I will select a small credit memo. Next to the top right hand corner, complete the value for the write off limit (i.e. $1.00). Assuming you want to create this write off credits for all customers, you do not need to complete the section for Company ID or Customer ID. By clicking on the Find Documents, the software will search for all appropriate documents which meet the selection criteria. See example below:

The grid area will populate with documents. You can select/ unselect grid populated documents, as desired. You can control where the write off for the selected documents goes to by clicking on the bottom: Multiple Account Distribution. When you click this button, this screen appears:

Please note the line for the grid selected before clicking the button will determine which ref number (i.e. invoice number) you are writing off. You also have control by ref number as to which account is going to be the offset account to the AR account for this write-off. In this example the account is 6060-000000.

If desired, you can enter multiple accounts with their write off amounts in this screen, just as long as the write off amount totals to 100% of the total shown above.

Please note since the main write off form shown the document type, you can see if the document is a credit memo, invoice, etc.

Several of our customers use this feature as a quick way to write off finance charges created on a statement.

When you have finalized your selected documents, and any changes to where the balance is to be written off, then you need to click the begin processing button. The power of this screen is that it creates the appropriate write off document (i.e. credit memo or debit memo) and links this newly created document to the original selected document, all at once. Walla… your small balances are cleaned up!!!

Much much easier than manually creating the write off document and then going back into the customer apply screen.