Customer - Financial tab

Topic overview

The Customer Details window - Financial tab, shown in Figure 1, contains information and options that relate to the financial aspect of the customer record.

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Figure 1: The Customer Details window - Financial tab

The purpose, function and contents of the items on the tab are explained in detail in Table 1.

Item

Purpose, Function or Contents

Price Schedule

The Price Schedule item allows you to choose a Price Schedule for the current customer.
Click the down arrow on the right to display a list of the Price Schedules in the system, as shown in Figure 2:


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Figure 2: The Price Schedule drop down

See: Price Schedules for more information on Price Schedules.

Charge Interest

You can decide on a customer-by-customer basis when to begin charging interest on a customer's account after issuing the invoice. For example, most of your customers normally pay you in 30 days, otherwise you charge them interest, except however, when you're dealing with a large company you may decide to allow them up to 60 or even 90 days to pay. If you do not want to charge them interest at all, then choose None. Note: the system does not automatically charge interest at the end of each month. You must run the Charge Interest routine just before printing the statements. This process optionally allows you to override charging interest to some customers. The Charge Interest drop down is shown in Figure 3:


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Figure 3: The Charge Interest drop down

Account Type

The Account Type offers six possible settings shown in Figure 4:

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Figure 4: The Account Type drop down

Cash Only
This settings requires that the customer pay C.O.D. with no option for back orders, special orders or layaways. Additionally, this customer cannot charge anything on credit.

Cash and Deposits
This type allows Deposits on Work Orders and Layaways without the need for a Credit Limit.

Suspended
This setting is intended to temporarily prevent an Account type customer from making any further charges to their account. The difference between the Suspended and the Cash Only setting is that the Suspended type allows Taking Payments on Account and the Cash Only does not.

Note: System Five displays the message 'Not an A/R Customer' at Point of Sale when attempting to charge a sale to either a Cash Only and Suspended type customer. The reason is you may have suspended the account for reasons other than being a bad customer. For example: you may have granted a charge sale on a one-time basis because they forgot their wallet.
However, if you want to add a nasty warning note, by all means do so. Use the Warning comment function for that purpose.



Charge
This setting allows the customer to charge invoices to their account and provide payments on account. Basically this is a regular house charge account configuration.

If you regularly take deposits on Work Orders or Layaways, then you must make those customers Account type customers as the deposit is considered a received on account payment. If you leave the customer's Credit Limit at zero dollars, the customer is able to charge their sales as long as the balance does not go over zero. When you take a deposit on an order, you actually put the customer into a credit position and you then owe them money or product. When the order arrives, you collect the balance of the cash and post it against the invoice. The the invoice is then converted to a charge sale, and the balance includes the deposit and the final payment, and the total due does not go above zero. If you try to deliver the goods and close the invoice without receiving the balance of the money owed, System Five does not let you.

Temp Suspended
This type is used to identify if the customer has been automatically suspended due to having unpaid invoices that exceed the number of days defined in the "Terms" field.

No Sales Permitted
There will be no sales permitted for this type of customer. However you can create an Estimate Invoice for this type.

Department

(Only visible in Departmentalized Systems)
This is a drop down list of the Departments defined in the system. An example of the drop down list is shown in Figure 5:


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Figure 5: Department list example

Unless the Customer Departments option is checked, the selection of a Department has no effect or function. However, if the option is checked, then you can specify that a Customer record belongs to a specific Department by selecting that Department from the drop down list. This prevents any other Department from using that Customer record. You can also select the None item from the drop down list to allow the Customer to be viewed and used by any Department.


See Also: Departments Overview for more information on the options and settings that affect Department behavior in System Five.

Native Currency

(Only visible when Multi-Currency in use)
Select the currency that the customer would like to be billed in. This would commonly be the currency native to the country in which the customer resides.

Taxes

Taxes can be a very complex issue. System Five provides numerous options to help in the proper configuration and application of Taxes.

Under most tax authorities, businesses and charities are provided a tax number that entitles them to purchase goods and/or services tax exempt. The Tax Number box is provided so you can enter their Tax Number for your records. This can also be included on the printed Invoices. The Tax Number is limited to 20 characters in length.

There are two methods of settings which exempt customers from paying tax or taxes.

  1. Simple Mode: In the Simple Mode, you check the taxes that the customer DOES NOT pay as shown in TBL-FIGURE 6a:


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TBL-FIGURE 6a: The Exempt Tax - Simple Mode


        In the example above, the Customer would NOT pay the PST Tax.

  • Warning: You can only set the first two of eight taxes as exempt in the Simple Mode.

  1. Extended Mode: In the Extended Mode, check the taxes that the customer DOES pay, as shown in TBL-FIGURE 6b:


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TBL-FIGURE 6b: The Pays Tax - Extended Mode


In the example above, the customer would pay the three taxes that are checked and would be exempt from all the others.


See: Customer Options - Use Extended Customer Tax Exceptions for more information on this optional method.

Tax Areas

Tax Areas are an extended feature of the System Five tax setup.
System Five allows you to collect different taxes for different areas, such as the different counties in California or the different rates for GST and HST in different parts of Canada. Further information on the settings for Tax Area can be found under Taxes.
To select a Tax Area, click the down arrow on the right side of the box and select the Tax Area from the drop down list.

Salesperson

In industrial sales, a salesperson can 'own' a customer and collect a commission on each sale to the customer regardless of who wrote the order. This is different than in retail sales where whoever writes the order gets the commission on the sale. If you're in the type of business where the salesperson 'owns' the customers, then you can select the salesperson here.
Note: you can also generate reports and mailing lists based on this flag. This allows you to print a list of all the customers that belong to a salesperson and then send him/her out for customer visits. As an extra option, you can enter the 'Last Visit Date' and if a salesperson has not recorded a customer visit for a certain period of time, typically 90 days, then you have the option of skipping over the sales commissions. No work, no pay.
Some businesses prefer to enter the sales zone instead of the actual salesperson. This is because sales people come and go and one salesperson may handle two or more zones on a temporary basis. This is an option. Just remember that you may have to add several zones together at the end of the month before calculating the salesperson's commission.

Credit Limit & Terms

The Credit Limit sets the maximum dollar amount that can be charged on the customers' account without management or supervisor override.
The Terms is a 20 character alpha-numeric fields that can be used to describe the payment terms. This value can be added to your invoice forms, so the customer sees the terms on each Invoice.

Sales Commission %

(Only visible if Commission Options - Commission Percentage uses Customer's Sales Commission % checked)
Input the percentage of commission to be paid to the salesperson for sales to this customer.

Allowance Period

(Specific to the Lighting Store purchase option.)
This value is used by the Lighting Store specific report titled, Projected Receivables Report.
The value defaults to the maximum of 47, you can enter any value between 1 and 47. The field cannot be blank.
It represents the number of days that the customer typically takes to pay their bills and is used by the Projected Receivables Report to estimate when outstanding monies can be expected from the specific customers. This field has no other purpose or function and can be ignored if you are not using the Projected Receivables Report.

Table 1: The Financial tab items

There are three items that cannot be edited on the Financial tab:

Note: On the customer points list (displayed when double-clicking the Points Balance text box), you can show all (Available and Reward) points on an invoice by checking the Show All check box.

See also: Promotions for more information on the Points feature.