If you sell to customers who have subcustomers, the Consolidated Payments feature gives you the flexibility to accept payment for subcustomer invoices from either the top-level customer or from the individual subcustomer.
With this feature enabled, when you select a top-level customer in the Customer field at Customers > Accounts Receivable > Accept Customer Payments > List, the Invoices subtab shows both the invoices entered for the top-level customer as well as the open invoices for each of its subcustomers.
Additionally, when a top-level customer is selected on the Payment page, the Deposits and Credits subtabs list all of the deposits and credits entered for the top-level customer and its subcustomers. These credits and deposits can be applied to any of the open invoices entered for the top-level customer or its subcustomers.
If you allow customers to make payments through the Customer Center, top-level customers can make payments on their invoices or the invoices of their subcustomers. They can also apply any credits or deposits to these invoices.
To enable the Consolidated Payments feature, go to Setup > Company > Setup Tasks > Enable Features > Accounting (Administrator), click the Accounting subtab, and check the Consolidated Payments box. After enabling the feature, you can go to Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences (Administrator), and enable the Apply Payments Through Top-Level Customer Only preference if you want to only apply payments, credits, and deposits through the top-level customer.
Consolidated Balance Fields
To help you track the consolidated balance for a customer-subcustomer hierarchy, when you enable this feature, the following consolidated balance fields are shown on the Financial subtab of customer records:
- Consolidated Balance – the total of all open invoices for the entire customer-subcustomer hierarchy.
- Overdue – shows the total overdue balance for all customers and subcustomers in the hierarchy
- Days – the number of days the consolidated overdue balance is past due
- Consolidated Deposit Balance – the total amount of unapplied deposits for all subcustomers and customers in this hierarchy
- Consolidated Unbilled Orders – the total amount on orders for the customers and subcustomers in this hierarchy that have been entered but not billed
- Consolidated aging fields – show the current consolidated balance broken down into amounts in each aging category (1 – 30 days, 31 – 60 days, etc.).
These fields can be added to custom reports by selecting the consolidated fields from the Customer folder. The consolidated fields are also available when performing a customer search. If you use the Multiple Currencies feature, balance fields on the customer record are shown in the customer’s currency. To add these fields to searches or reports, you can choose between either the fields in the base currency or the foreign currency.