Receivables lets you create two types of commitments:
Deposits: Create a deposit to record a customer's prepayment for goods or services that you will provide in the future.
Guarantees: Create a guarantee to record a contractual agreement with your customer to conduct business over a specified period of time.
Use the Transaction window to enter or update your customer commitments. Receivables lets you update certain information depending on the commitment status. For a list of fields you can update, see: Maintaining Your Transactions.
You define a commitment and then specify the debit and credit accounts. When your customers invoice or credit against their commitments, Receivables automatically adjusts the commitment balance and generates reversing accounting entries.
Note: You can also add a deposit to an invoice that is already completed. See: Using Commitments.
You can assign sales revenue and non-revenue credit as a percentage of the commitment total. If you do assign sales revenue credit, Receivables ensures that you assign 100% of your commitment total. To assign additional or bonus credit for certain sales, use non-revenue sales credits.
Note: You can specify in the transaction type whether you want to include tax and freight when applying a deposit to a transaction. See: Transaction Types.
Prerequisites
To enter a commitment, follow the same procedure that you used when entering transactions. See: Entering Transactions.
The following steps are unique, however, to entering commitments.
Choose a transaction Class of Deposit or Guarantee.
Enter the payment Terms if this commitment is a deposit.
You cannot enter installment payment terms if the commitment is a guarantee.
Open the Commitment tabbed region.
Enter a range of Effective Dates for this commitment (optional). If you do not assign an end date, Receivables lets you enter invoices and credit memos against this commitment indefinitely until the amount due becomes zero. If you enter an end date, Receivables verifies that all existing invoices against this commitment are included in this date range.
Enter the Amount of this commitment.
Note: You can never use more than the original deposit amount, or increase the deposit amount.
Enter either an Item or a Memo Line for this commitment, or select from the list of values.
If AutoAccounting depends on standard line items, Receivables uses the revenue account associated with this item or memo line along with your AutoAccounting setup to determine the default revenue, AutoInvoice Clearing, Unbilled Receivable, Unearned Revenue, and Receivable accounts for this commitment.
Enter a brief Description for this commitment.
To review or update accounting information, choose Distributions. See: Reviewing Accounting Information.
Note: Use the AR: Deposit Offset Account Source profile option to indicate how you want to derive the offset account for deposits. Receivables can use either AutoAccounting or the deposit's transaction type as the accounting source for the offset account.