Hello again everybody,
So, we’ve been live since January 2nd and I was told today that we send invoices to International customers before we build and ship out the orders. One way I can think of doing is to create the sales order, create the job, don’t release the job but ship the order, create invoice then unship the order and wait until the order is paid.
I was wondering if there was a better way to do this because orders like this will just hang for god knows how long. Thanks!
I would do an advanced billing invoice for the order. Then, just ship the job as normal when it actually ships. Once it ships, you still need to make another invoice for the shipment even if it nets to zero. The invoice will get a credit for the previous advanced billing, so if you invoiced 100% the net total of invoice is zero.
Set the customer/sales order up as proforma payment terms and you can generate the invoice from there without having to ship or unship - you can link and job and create a customer shipment once the invoice has been paid
We do it for some customers. There are two ways to do it. You can use a proforma invoice or make an advance billing invoice. We use both depending on the situation.
Vinay Kamboj
Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I will try these out in test now. If there are other ways, I’ll try them also. Thanks again.
Hello Mike,
Thanks for the reply. I’ve just tested it out and I have a question; So if I do advanced billing invoice for the sales order that I haven’t created a job for, it does not bring in the line quantity from the SO so would I just manually enter the price in as extended price? Quantity of the line and unit price is grayed out so can’t enter anything.
Wow even though I had to google how to print pro-forma invoice it took way less time than advanced billing invoice(sorry Mike). And it is easier to teach that to customer service because no one here is a fan of Epicor after Fishbowl. Is there any process done in the background when I print a pro-forma invoice? So after I print that and once we get paid we just do our regular process for the order like shipping then invoicing like regular?
Thanks again everybody!
Proforma invoice is definintely easy and can be done right on the order entry. There is no process done in the background to my knowledge and it does not affect anything.
Vinay Kamboj
Yeah most people are not a fan of their new system the first month of being live, but that is probably more old>new than fishbowl>epicor. They will come around quick enough.
For the pro-forma invoice, it for sure is easier but you just need to make sure it achieves what you are trying to do. If you are expecting your customer to actually pay the initial invoice you send them then it might not be the best idea to just do a pro-forma since they don’t get tracked and wont be on your ageing. When you receive the cash, your cash receipt wont be to the invoice since there isn’t one. You could do a deposit cash receipt to the order, then when you ship and do a final invoice that deposit will get applied. Just seems like you may end up with more messes to clean up the pro-forma way.
I struggle to see how the advance billing is supposed to work. Without the system either pulling the Quantity from the sales order or being able to manually enter the quantity, when we print the invoice, it shows the product and 0 quantity for whatever value we enter in the Extended Price field. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to send that to customers for fear of confusion this could cause.
Is there any way to do a complete invoice prior to shipping? We’re not really keen on the Pro-forma invoice since payments have no real invoice against which to match.
Advanced Billing allows you to invoice off a value of the Sales Order as required before you ship the goods.
Once shipped another Invoice will be created for the remaining balance.
Try it in a Test area, not every one uses Advanced Billing, normally if you are in an industry with very large projects going on you will want to invoice after say 10%, 40% and 80% of the line is complete but only ship the Sales Order at the end when 100% is complete.
So for the case where we require payment up front before releasing stock (unreliable customer, for example), what is the standard way of achieving this?
Hi Andrew,
go to AR, invoice entry, make new group then new invoice. Then new line can be either advanced billing or deposit line. Then you will have to choose the sales order for which the invoice is done and that’s it.
Supposing you also have the GL controls for it. You need to post the invoice BEFORE creating the end invoice (it makes sense otherwise you will not be able to book the payment on it).
Final invoice will come with the rest of the value of the sales order (line values minus advanced payment/deposit invoice).
As usual make setting first in TEST environment, get accounting to test it and so on …
Regards,
Mihai
I think the concept is you are not billing for the product, you are billing in advance, so the quantity is zero and you just enter the amount to bill. If your customer gets confused probably depends on the context. If they are expecting to get an invoice because you require cash before shipment, the qty may not be confusing. If your terms are net 30 from shipment, then it might seem a little weird. When we do an advanced billing for progress payments we put a comment on the invoice line saying that to reduce confusion.
Enter an AR Deposit with the Sales Order referenced.
I believe the 2 should tie up once the Invoice is created from the Shipment.
Simon
We had the same issue with Advanced Billing, I ended up editing the SSRS form, by default the SSRS form pulls the shipped qty and NOT the ordered qty, I added a field to the SSRS form to show both the ordered qty and the shipped qty