Accounts Receivables, Payroll, Inventory and General Ledger Modules
The Accounts Receivable (AR) module is used to process customer invoices and payments. It also provides accounts receivable cash, debit and credit memos, aging reports, and automatic posting to the General Ledger module.
AR is an important execution module of the Finance segment of an ERP system, focusing on maintaining financial relationship with vendors and customers. It also helps in improving cash flow by reducing days sales outstanding (DSO) and eliminating bad debt.
1. Accounts Receivable
Accounts receivable (AR) is the cash amount that a client owes your company. This value determines the ease with which you are able to collect payments from your customers, and it also helps banks and investors evaluate whether you are a good candidate for loans. Managing AR is an essential part of the business process.
The AR module allows you to record the master information and basic transactions related to customer invoicing, payment and settlement. It also provides a detailed log of all accounts receivable transactions and can automatically post them to the General Ledger.
BS&A’s Accounts Receivable module is a powerful, flexible tool for managing customers, billing items and invoices. It can create recurring invoices and automate partial payments, multiple bill payments and over/short adjustments.
It can also apply settlement discounts to certain customers who make their payments within a prescribed period of time and define ageing buckets for invoices. The system tracks and reports the total receivable balance based on an aging schedule. This is useful for reducing your overall AR balances and can help you minimize collection costs.
You can configure your account balances in either single-folio or per aging periods and you can enter pre-existing AR balances from your previous systems. This can be done using the system configuration menu under System Configuration>Accounts Receivable.
Accounts Receivable Billing is a versatile solution for processing recurring transactions and capturing sales, service, and grant revenues. It can also be used to track inventory items, including the cost of goods sold.
It is used by governmental and nonprofit organizations to bill third parties or individuals. It includes features that enable automated estimating and reporting, a AR glasses streamlined sales tax calculation, and the ability to create recurring invoices for items such as rent.
Invoices are grouped by Charge Codes, which represent the items or services that were sold, provided or billed, as well as service charges, sales tax, finance charges, or other billable fees. They can be sorted by bill group, zip codes, or alphabetically.
The A/R Billing module is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that need to manage sales and payments from a variety of customers. Its user-defined Billing Groups allow you to create billing cycles for groups of customers with similar transaction types, which streamlines the accounting cycle and speeds up processing. It also includes user-defined Customer Statements that are easily sorted by Billing Group, zip codes or alphabetically, which display all activity since the last statement date, including new invoice postings, credits, adjustments and payments received.
2. General Ledger
The general ledger is the main financial reporting system of a company, recording transactions to produce a balance sheet and income statement. This is a permanent record of all accounting activity in a company.
This is the part of a company’s financial management that keeps track of all the money coming in and going out of the business, including cash, accounts receivable, inventories, payroll, interest expenses, depreciation, and taxes. Its accounts also include fixed assets such as buildings, machinery, equipment, and software, and investments such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
A general ledger also includes subledgers, which are separate ledgers used to record specific types of business activities. For example, accounts receivable are a subledger that tracks the amounts that customers owe to a company for products they sell or services they provide.
The general ledger is a useful tool for accountants to make sure the company’s books are balanced, as every credit must be offset by a debit. This is important because it can help prevent fraudulent or incorrect accounting transactions.
In order to keep the general ledger from becoming out of balance, a company may choose to use blockchain technology, which stores all its accounting data in a secure database that can prevent unauthorized access. It can also prevent hackers from stealing confidential information about the company’s finances.
Another benefit of using a general ledger is that it reports real transactions instead of those that are forecasted in a budget. This helps to provide a more accurate picture of a company’s finances and make it easier to identify fraud or file taxes.
Lastly, the general ledger is used to prepare a trial balance by summarizing all the debits and credits in all its accounts. This helps accountants to ensure that the company’s books are properly balanced before preparing tax returns.
The CMiC Enterprise General Ledger is fully integrated with the Job Costing, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and System Data modules to maintain company, department, and account information and ensure that financial data is recorded in a timely manner. The CMiC Enterprise General Ledger module also allows you to maintain budgets and forecasts.
3. Payroll
Payroll is a module that automatically distributes AR glasses paychecks to employees with the appropriate taxes deducted and handles expense reimbursement. It also provides reports on payroll expenses, total overtime hours and similar key performance indicators (KPIs).
This module covers all aspects of payroll processing including employee information, pay schedules, tax calculations and more. The module is updated annually with new topics and changes, plus tips and trends. It also includes online hints and feedback to help you develop your payroll skills.
The Payroll module is a key component of the HRIS system. It supports agency specific payroll related activities for on and off-cycle processing, and it summarizes by earnings code the total count, hours and earnings applicable to each earnings type; deductions are similarly summarized.
A variety of reports capture payroll data, and it is important to use multiple reports for efficient and effective capturing of the entire payroll process. These include the GL Trial Balance posted total amounts, EPM Query 3 (PR detail), GL PR Journal Entries and HRMS Payroll Summary.
When running any of these reports, it is important to set up prompt values that ensure capturing all required payroll rows for the report. * Always set both pay period end dates and check date ranges for efficient processing of these queries.
For example, if your facility uses the 26.1 week pay frequency assigned to most executive branch employees, you must set both ends to be two weeks before the pay period end date and the check date ranges to be the check date. This is to ensure that you are capturing all payroll rows for your department.
Depending on your settings, you can use the Vendor Invoices and Checks feature to automatically generate invoice transactions for payment of specially coded employee withholding amounts, scheduled deductions or employer paid benefits. You can post the generated invoice transactions to the Fund Accounting module, or you can pay them directly from the Payroll module using the Accounts Payable feature.
The Vendor Invoices and Checks option is primarily used by municipal installations that interface the Payroll module with the Fund Accounting module. There are two major pathways for the generated invoices, and most installations choose one method to simplify control of the feature.
4. Inventory
The Inventory module provides a variety of ways to keep track of inventory. This includes defining the cost method, units of measurement and warehouse and bin locations for inventory items. It also allows users to set safety stock, lead time and resale price breaks for inventory items.
The inventory system also allows you to assign a lot number and serial numbers to each item in your warehouse. This helps ensure that you do not purchase too many or too few of any item and keeps you from overstocking inventory.
Inventory also includes the ability to define a kitting process that allows inventory items to be packaged and sold in different configurations as they are received. This can be especially useful for distributors and manufacturers who have products that need to be packaged in several different ways.
To maintain a complete and accurate inventory record, you need to keep track of the cost and availability of each item. The inventory module lets you do this easily and efficiently.
You can group inventory items by category in Sales Order Entry and Invoice Data Entry, so that they are priced based on the total ordered quantity of all items within that grouping method. This is an alternative to using the pricing schedule that you set up for your company.
If you choose this option, the inventory cost and resale price will be displayed on the line of a Sales Order or invoice that contains those items. This will help you to avoid reselling items that are too expensive or too cheap for your company.
This option also gives you the opportunity to change the remit type that will be used on each cash receipt. Select Yes if you want the remit type to be automatically populated on each cash receipt, or No if you want to manually enter the remit type on each cash receipt.
When you select this option, the system looks at the profile options values that you have set for the operating unit whose responsibilities will be responsible for creating intercompany AR invoices for the items in the inventory in question. If the profile option values in one responsibility are identical to the profile option values in another, the program uses those values.
