Advanced Fund
Management Solutions

October 2006
Hi Everyone,

This month we cover third party invoicing in Accounts Receivable. Many of you invoice a person or institution for services provided to one or more recipients. Learn how to setup and do it! You may not have known that you can "compress", or summarize, selected account's activity on a Ledger report, but you can. This one may save you a lot of paper! As always, if you have any questions regarding an Accufund® issue, please contact me at (318) 253-8556, or email me at jgarv@afmss.com

Thanks,
Judy Garver

Third Party Billing

AccuFund provides the ability to bill a customer for the goods and services provided to another (called a client). In this article we will see an example of educational services provided to two clients, yet paid by a third party.

First, the system must be setup to provide for this capability. Go to Setup/Configuration, and then select the Accounts Receivable item. The screen at right will appear:

Check the "3rd Party Billing" check box, as shown. This is all that is required to turn on third party billing.

We will now add an invoice that pays for tuition for two clients. It will be billed to another customer (the third party). Open "Browse Invoices" in Accounts Receivable. Click on the insert button. The form below will open:

Notice that "Don Donaldson" has been selected as the "Customer". This customer is the "Third Party". Enter a description. Click on the "Insert" button. The form below opens:

Note that the first field is for the client. Select Jan Gaynier from the drop down list. Key in a description of this portion of the invoice. Payment on behalf of this client will be made for 14 credit hours at $189 each. A revenue account has been selected at the bottom of the form by using the "Insert" button. Click on the "OK" button. You will be back on the Invoice form.

Click on the "Insert" button again and add the second client as shown below:

The client is Foster Grant. Enter a description. This invoice will pay for 10 hours of tuition at $190 per hour. A revenue account has been inserted at the bottom of the form.

Click on the "OK" button. The invoice will now look like the one below.

There are a number of ways that the above transaction can be reported. One way is shown below:

The above report is a modified sales activity report that shows customers (in this case Don Donaldson) and the clients for which they are being invoiced. The report could be modified to list all of the clients along with the third parties that paid for their tuition.

Third party billing can be used for other situations, too, such as medical services provided to clients and paid by a third party. Another example can be clients (children) that receive day care services with the parents, or guardians being the third party. Perhaps your operation involves providing goods or services to clients and billing a third party. This feature, with the flexible reporting capability AccuFund provides, may solve your problems!

Compressed Accounts

If you do not want to see detail transaction activity for one, or more, accounts in a Ledger report, you may want to "Compress" certain accounts. For example, on a ledger report, you may not want to see all of the entries that comprise the Wages Payable account, just the summary (compressed) amount. That may be too much detail, and it makes the report too long. However, you will probably want to see each debit and credit for your expenses accounts. Any account may be "compressed" so that you do not see its detail activity, but just its summary amount. This article shows you how.

Two test accounts have been added to the chart of accounts and will be the subjects of our article. The first, is 999 999 9999 98. It is an expense account that is all nines, except for the last digit, which is an "8". Its description is "Test Account #1". It is not "Compressed". The second test account is shown below:

Note that this expense account is all nines, and has a check mark in the "Compress" box, as indicated by the arrow cursor.

The next step is to use the two accounts in a transaction. Two debits will be placed in Test Account #1 (999 999 9999 98) and two credits will be placed in Test Account #2 (999 999 9999 99).

Shown below is the transaction:

To see the effect on the Ledger report, we'll run it for just the two test accounts:

Note, above, that the Ledger report is selected and that the account masks pulls only our two test accounts (to limit the report results).

The resulting report is shown below:

The Ledger report shows that both debits made to Test Account #1 show up separately on the report. That's because this account was not compressed. Test Account #2 shows up only once on the report with the total credit of $200. Because the transaction has been compressed to one entry, a different transaction description is used, namely "Summary".

Even if an account has been in use for some time without being "compressed", you may switch it to "compressed" and all previous and future entries, for that account, will show as compressed on the Ledger report.

Still want to see the detailed transactions for a "compressed" account-sometimes? Run a predefined Journal or Detail report! Or, you could uncheck the "Compress" box on the account and then run the Ledger report. Then go back and "compress" the account again.

This may be a useful way to reduce the length of those Ledger reports and help you spot the other accounts in which you do have detailed interest!

Did You Know...?

Cash Management. It's easy to transfer money from one bank account to another to, say, cover a payroll drawn on another bank. Just go to Cash Management/Browse Bank Register (make sure you select the bank from which the funds will be taken) and click on the "Adjust" button. Select the "Transfer to:" radio button, choose the bank that will receive the funds, and enter the dollar amount.

General Ledger. The Court Fines module is designed to track and report citations that pass through the court system. Each citation can have more than one violation on it (for example, someone could be issued a citation for two violations: speeding and having expired plates). The module also tracks the citation's progress through the court system with dates of each step (Issued, Bound Over, Adjudicated, or Dismissed).

Inventory. Inventory items are normally issued to your departments. Each department may be expensed for the items it receives. The expense amount will be calculated based on the average cost of items issued. Each time you issue inventory, you may run an issue report (that you create with the Reports/Form designer) that can be given to the department. That way they won't be surprised by the expense on their monthly expense report!