SERVICE CHARGES
The Business Edge has a feature that will allow you to create service charges for your customers based on past due invoices. These charges help alleviate cash flow problems and reimburse you for collection efforts. It also incentivizes your customers to pay on time to avoid paying more in fees.
This step only has to be done the first time you start using the Service Charges in The Business Edge. Set up the Finance Charges Start date – this date tells the system how far back to go on open invoices by the invoice date. If the Start Date is 1/1/23 then Prepare Service Charges will ignore any invoice dated before that date even if it’s overdue. The Finance Charges Start Date is located in:
Utilities
System Administrator System
System Set Up
Miscellaneous Setup
Enter & Edit Entity Flags
Accounts Receivable Flags
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The Service Charge also allows you to set a system wide minimum Finance Charge Amount in the screen below. This allows you to determine the threshold in which the service charges are billed. You many not want the system to create any charges that are less than 1.00 for instance.
Next, Each Customer Payment Term must be set up with a “Service Charge Annual Interest” %
Accounts Receivable System
A/R File Maintenance
Terms & Tax Auth. System
Enter & Edit Payment Terms
Each Customer that you would like to charge service charges must be set up so that their “Calc. Finance Charges?” flag is set to Yes. This flag is located in Master Files, Enter & Edit Customers, see the screen below.
A miscellaneous charge code must be set up for Service Charges. The miscellaneous charge can be set up here:
Order & Quote Entry System
Order Entry File Maintenance
Miscellaneous Charges System
Enter & Edit Miscellaneous Charges
The Miscellaneous Charge’s Standard Charge should be set as zero because the system will calculate the finance charges.
After the initial set up, you can prepare service charges for your customers here:
Accounts Receivable System
Service Charges
Prepare Service Charges
When running Prepare Service Charges for the first time, you will get a screen that says:
Say Yes to continue and the next screen will require a Last Finance Charge Date.
This step will come up the first time you create Service Charges and will set all open invoices as if they were prepared on the Last Finance Charge Date Entered. The Last Finance Charge Date should be entered as the date that you would like the finance charges to start from. That enables the system to only create service charges since the that date.
The system will now allow you to create the service charge invoices for the Customers that fit the criteria. Select the as of date and the Miscellaneous Charge
The Finance Charge Pre-List will show a list of Customers and Invoices with Finance Charges and the Amount of Finance Charge. The list can be displayed on screen or any of the choices below.
The Finance Charge Pre-List will display the Customer, Invoice Number, the finance charge amount, the last time finance charges were created for the customer and many other fields shown below in the list of optional columns
When you are ready to proceed, press ok or escape and you will see the update screen below
At this point you can cancel at the bottom right of the screen if you are not ready to proceed. If you are ready to proceed press OK or escape to see the General ledger summary posting options. The General Ledger Summary can be output to the screen or paper
If you select to output to screen you will see the General Ledger Summary below
The invoices created from the service charges automatically post to the Customer account as an open invoice and at this point you can send your customer statements to reflect the open service charge invoices