Accounts Payable & Cheque Control

Shown here are the Payment to Vendors and Cheque List windows. Both windows are accessible from the Main window using the "A/P & Chq" button. They are only accessible to Admin Level 1.

At the bottom left-most corner of the Payment to Vendors window there are 2 options buttons:

• Unpaid Invoices
• Paid Invoices

At anytime, click on any of these option buttons to view your paid or unpaid invoices. You can order invoice rows by different headers using the "Order By" drop box at top right corner.

Unpaid Invoices view

Selecting the "Unpaid Invoices" option button generates a list of items that you have added into the Inventory using the Add Stock window.  This view is used to process payment by linking an invoice or invoices to be paid to the number of a cheque that is to be issued to the vendor.

To process payment, you begin by selecting a row or rows on this window. Given that an invoice from a supplier may have more than 1 row of items, an invoice may span across several rows on this window.

 

The system will automatically select all the rows belonging to an invoice when you click on a row. Even if any row belonging to the same invoice has been missed - say due to holding down the Ctrl key and selecting rows specifically - when you attempt to process payment by clicking the 'Pay Now' button (explained below), the program will prompt that a row or rows have been missed.

Assuming you have now selected all the rows of an invoice, the value of all selected rows will be computed by the program and shown in the "Subtotal" and "Total" boxes on the bottom panel.

How do you next process payment?  Just click the 'Pay Now' button on the bottom panel. 

However if Vendor drop list at the top is showing "All Companies" a blocking message will warn that you need to select a single vendor name from the vendor drop list. This is because you might have selected different vendors' invoices to be paid with the same cheque.

Assuming you have now selected a single vendor name from the drop list above, its invoices will be displayed if there is any.  Now you can select 1 or more rows belong to either 1 or more invoices and then click the 'Pay Now' button.

If however there was a discount, shipping or other charges you can use the "Discount" and "Shipping etc" fields to enter the values.  The "Total" amount will then factor in these charges the moment your cursor has moved away from those fields.

Notice there is a cheque number shown in the "Cheque No." box on the bottom panel. (If there is none, you need to start a new cheque series. This will be explained later.)

Once you click the 'Pay Now' button the selected rows disappear from view and the cheque number next in sequence appears in the Cheque No. box. The idea here is that no cheque number is allowed to be missed. This prevents misuse of a cheque or inadvertently skipping a cheque number. This is how the system enforces cheque control.

Now you can use the cheque number which was shown before this to issue payment to the vendor. 

(Should you forget what that number was, you can always switch to the "Paid Invoices" view to get a list of paid invoices, then double on the invoice number to see the associated cheque number in a popup - illustrated in screenshot below).

If you have a spoilt cheque, you can skip it. For example cheque number 630007 is to be skipped, then just click the Skip Cheque button below the 'Pay Now' button.  The program will prompt you for a reason why this cheque is being skipped.  You then submit a reason which will be recorded in the Cheque List window. The next cheque number, in this case, 630008 will now appear in the Cheque No. box.

Remember this window is only accessible to Admin users only, so skipping a cheque is under proper executive control.

If you are just starting up in using this window, you will need to create your cheque series so that cheque numbers in sequence will be shown in the Cheque No. box.  To do this, just enter the first cheque number in that series and enter also the number of cheques in that series in the input boxes at the bottom right corner of the window. 

Next hit the "Create" button and the cheque series is now created in the Cheque List window.  To view them click the "Show Cheque List" button at the bottom leftmost corner of the screen.  The Cheque List window appears. Select the date when this cheque series is created from the "Select Cheque Start Date" drop box at the top of this Cheque List window.

The series of cheque numbers in running order appears and if a cheque number has been used, the paid amount, paid date, invoice number, vendor name, so forth will be shown on that particular cheque number row.

 

Paid Invoices view

 

In the "Paid Invoices" screen, if you need to know the details of that row, just double click on it and a popup window will provide the details on cheque number, invoice(s) paid using that cheque, vendor name, so forth as shown in the screenshot here.

By selecting a row and hitting the "Cleared On" button on the bottom panel, you can set a cheque as been cleared by a vendor based on your bank reports. 

 

You can also restore a cheque and its associated invoice(s) if there is a mistake in assigning a cheque number or if the cheque is damaged and so you need to skip it.  This can be done by selecting the target row and clicking the "Restore" button on the bottom panel.

 

The selected invoice(s) now disappears from this "Paid Invoices" window and reappears in the "Unpaid Invoices" window. 

 

The cheque number previously assigned to the invoice(s) will also reappear in the "Unpaid Invoices" view.  You can either use it again or skip it if it is a case of a spoilt cheque.