Quick tips on cleaning up your Accounts Receivable

Wanting to get a jump on preparing for year end?  Here are a few suggestions on cleaning up your Accounts Receivable Aged Trial Balance before the year-end crunch begins:

• Review your accounts receivable detail reports and confirm that all invoices listed are valid.  If any are not a receivable, then make sure you understand why they continue to be on the reports and correct those that don’t belong.

• If an invoice was entered as taxed but the customer didn’t pay the sales tax, issue a credit memo for the original taxable invoice, then re-issue the invoice as non-taxable. Both the credit memo and the new invoice should be created in the same in the current sales tax period.

• For partially-paid invoices whose balance will not be paid, issue a credit memo for the amount that will not be paid.  Apply the credit to the invoice in the Receive Payments window.

• Clean up zero Customer balances by applying credit transactions to the invoice transactions through the Receive Payments window.

• Move Customer Deposits out of a Liability Account by invoicing the Customer in full and adding a new line with a negative amount equal to the deposit.  This will reduce the amount of the deposit and invoice the Customer in full.

• Clean up open Sales Orders by running Reports > Sales > Open Sales Orders by Customer (or Item).  If they will not be fulfilled, close them by double-clicking on the original transaction from the report and placing a check mark in the “clsd” column.

• Remove any inactive Estimates that will never turn into an order.  Open the Customer Center, click on the Transactions tab, then click on Estimates.  Double-click on the Estimate then go to the Edit menu and click Delete Estimate.