Advanced Fund
Management Solutions

Hi Everyone,

This issue, as last month's, is dedicated to one topic—this time the new Client Accounting module. This module greatly expands the concept of third party billing that you may already be doing in AccuFund. You now may track clients through Purchasing, Payables, and Receivables. See if this module fits your organizational requirements!

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

Client Accounting

Client Accounting is a new module that tracks charges and expenses you incur in providing goods and services to clients. In our example your organization is providing employment related computer training classes to relocated employees. The students (clients) will take the classes, but will not be billed for the costs. Their employer will be invoiced for the classes. You will incur other costs, such as a laptop computer for the students that you will run through your Purchasing/Accounts Payable system, and then pass along to the employer (our customer).

This article will demonstrate the entry of a purchase order (which will become a bill) for an item a client will use in a computer class. Once this has been accomplished, a report will be created that will help invoice the customer for its clients' expenses. During that report creation, we will discuss what information we should pull out of the system and use for client billing of the vendor.

An invoice will also be entered into Accounts Receivable to get reimbursement for a client's training classes.

The menu (above) for Client Accounting gives us some hints about how this module works. First, the name of the module is Client Accounting, not Client Billing. The distinction is that this component will post client (Client is a new category of organization that AccuFund tracks) information to the accounting system (for example, an AR invoice that pays for something on behalf of the client, but a vendor is billed for it). If you use the module, you will notice that when you enter a requisition or purchase order, you may associate a client with a stock item on the PO. When you enter an invoice, you cannot associate charges for the client with an item. And, in similar manner, when you enter a bill in Accounts Payable, you may associate expenses with a client, but not with a stock item. Thus, if you need to associate client activity with stock items, you will need to start the process by entering a requisition or purchase order. (We won't be using stock items in this article, but we will start with a purchase order.) Secondly, as you can see from the Client Accounting icons above, most are associated with reporting. The remaining icon (other than the Exit icon) is for adding new organizations (possibly clients). Client Accounting is accomplished in other modules (Purchasing, Receivables and Accounts Payable). This means that you will have to rely on the reporting system to extract client activity. Thirdly, once you have reported and reviewed client activity with reports, you will be required to enter the appropriate invoices in Accounts Receivable to invoice the customers for goods and services received by their clients. This is the current nature of the Client Accounting system; an Account Billing system might integrate requisitions, purchase orders, invoices and bills, and automatically create Accounts Receivable invoices to vendors for their clients.

By-the-way, if you have requirements for a client accounting/billing system that cannot be met by this module, as currently configured, let us know. AccuFund prides itself on incorporating customer requirements into its products. This is a new product; thus, customer requirements are most likely to be incorporated in the near future.

We'll start the process of Client Accounting by adding a Purchase Order for an item that that the student's will need in the computer training class—a laptop. We're not starting with a requisition because it will save space.

The first part of the Purchase Order is shown below: It orders a laptop computer from Office Max for student Foster Grant.

The second part of the purchase order is shown below: It shows the client (Foster Grant) and the quantity, amount and accounting.

Once the PO is saved, it can be received:

A quantity of one is being received on the Foster Grant PO.

The Bill is being added below: It contains two orders for laptops, one for Foster Grant, and one for Lisa Gaynier.

Once the Bill is saved, we can pay it, at which time the bill will be considered paid by the system. We'll be able to report paid bills, then we can bill the third party (the customer) for them.

 Above, the bill has been marked for payment, and the check was produced. We now have something to report to the customer who is paying for the client expenses.

A columnar report was written (in the Forms Designer) that shows the clients and what was purchased for them: It was run for the month of April, and shows the paid amounts, which does not include the amounts that still might be on purchase orders.

From a report like this, one can determine how much should be invoiced to the customer that pays the client's expenses (in this case, $1,500 for the month of April).

Next, we enter an invoice for the $1,500 to the Dept of Revenue (the customer).

The invoice above resulted from expenses incurred to our organization through the purchasing system. Our organization may also provide services, such as training. Below is an invoice to the Department of Revenue for Foster grant, for one month's training (20 days at $200 per day).

You should have a pretty good idea of how the Client Accounting module works. It integrates itself into the Purchasing, Payables, and Receivable modules. Activity in those modules may be extracted via reporting and form the basis for invoices to the third party customer.