About Customer Payments

Use the A/R Payments form to process customer payments for invoiced amounts, finance charges, and other amounts your customers owe you. You can enter and post non-customer payments to the General Ledger as non-A/R cash.

You can also enter post-dated checks on the A/R Payments form. The payment type must be check.

Note: You can apply open credits and payments from a customer only to the customer and any of its subordinate customers. You cannot apply a subordinate customer's open credits or payments to another customer that is a subordinate of the same corporate customer.

Before you post payments, you must apply or distribute the payment amount to invoices, finance charges with balance due, non-A/R cash, or an open payment. You can do so manually through the Distributions button, or you can select Actions > Generate Distributions to have the system automatically distribute it.

When you generate distributions for invoices with multiple due dates, if you apply a payment towards a due date, the system creates a partial payment record. If more than one payment for the same invoice is applied, only one record will be created for that invoice.

You can also re-apply open credits or open payments against invoices. To re-apply an open credit, enter a new payment against an existing check or draft number. The system fills in the G/L Reference field with the description "Re-Application of Open Payment." The system does not post the transaction to the General Ledger or to the customer's record. The transaction updates the corresponding Open Item record.

See Example: Reapplication of an Open Payment.

For credit card payments (which are available only if the Credit Card Interface is used in your system), you cannot change the payment amount and other components, in order to ensure that the payment reconciles to the credit card charge. However, it is still possible to apply the payment to multiple invoices.

When you post A/R payments, the system prompts you to print a Payment Transaction Report, which serves as an edit report.

A/R Payments supports multiple invoices with different transactional currencies. The payment currency does not have to be the same as that of the Bank Code. The payment amount is converted to the bank amount, and the bank amount is converted to the domestic amount.

If you enter a payment amount in a part of euro currency, the system performs the triangulation conversion method.

Caution: If you enter an A/R payment for a customer, bank code, and check number combination that already exists and Transfer VAT on the Tax Systems form is selected, an error message displays and the system stops the transaction.