Customer Transactions

In the previous video we covered the order, in the order to cash process. In this video, we’ll cover the receivables or cash part. This video is a continuation of the last video in which we created and fulfilled a sales order. After you have provided something to a customer you will generally want to be paid. When we were in the sales order transaction in the last video we had the option to accept a deposit for the specific sales order. Let’s bring up the previous sales order again by going to Transactions, Sales, Enter Sales Orders and choosing List. My list is already sorted in reverse chronological order, so the latest sales orders show up here at the top. If it wasn’t I could click on any of the column headers to sort my list. Let’s view this first sales order. We still have the option to accept a customer deposit, but this button was also here earlier. Customer deposits can be important for a number of reasons, to secure an order. From the sales order, we have the ability to bill the remaining amount of the sales order, that is, whatever has not been paid already. This would take us to an invoice screen, where we could complete any information for the invoice, that did not automatically flow over from the sales transaction. We could also use the Next Bill button, which creates the next bill in a series of bills, if the sales order was setup so that the customer had installment payments. If we needed to authorize a return we could do that from here as well, in case there was a problem with the order. All of these actions can be taken through the Transactions menu as well, but whether you want to do them through the menu or through the sales order, is going to depend on what you are doing, if you need the transactions linked, and if you are performing a one-off action, or are looking to do lots of similar actions at the same time. For instance, if I wanted to generate dozens or hundreds of invoices, without finding and going to each sales order, I could go to Transactions then Sales and select Invoice Sales Orders. For this sales order and customer, let’s go ahead and bill the remaining balance of this sales order, by clicking Bill Remaining. The same as when we walked through moving from opportunity, to quote, to sales order, we now have an invoice with most of the information filled in. We can always make changes here on this form, so if there was an address change that needed to be made, so the customer received the invoice, or a project needed to be added to the invoice, we could do that. I’ll click save, and we have now saved the invoice. We can print it the same as we did the quote, using the print button up here. We could just as easily send this to a customer by using the Email option under the Action menu. We’ve invoiced our customer, and they sent us a check. We now want to accept payment on the invoice. That’s done with the aptly named, Accept Payment button. Click it and we are taken to the payment screen. We can come over to the payment method subtab, and we can select a payment method, such as check. We can put in a check number if we want, so we can cross reference this payment with our bank when working with our financials later. I’ll put in 54321. We can add any other information we want here, that we think would be relevant now or in the future. When we’re done we can click save, and the payment is saved. Much like we saw with payables earlier, this is just a paper transaction. We still need to physically deposit the check. Had this been a credit card payment, we would have had the option to either manually charge the card, or have the card charge go through NetSuite, and a third-party payment processor; assuming we had this integration setup. In some cases, the merchandise we send out to customers is just not what they needed or expected, and in those cases, we generally need to issue RMA’s and Refunds. We can do this from the sales order, or the invoice. In our case, let’s go ahead and open this, 608, sales order. Authorizing a return is as simple as clicking the Authorize Return button. We’re taken to a return authorization screen, from here we can make any adjustments we need to. For example, maybe the customer was only unhappy with a single telephone because it arrived broken. We could change this to a quantity of one, at the line item level. We’ll add a reason for return as Received Damaged. Now we’ll click Save and start the return process. Because of the way my NetSuite instance is setup, my return is pending approval. Yours may or may not have this same state. Because I am an administrator however, I can approve my own returns, so that’s what I’ll do, by clicking the Approve Return button. The rest of the process from here is pretty straight forward. I am taken through receiving the return, which is similar to how I would be taken through receiving inventory that I ordered from a supplier, and that’s something we’ll cover in a few movies from now. For your larger customers, there may come a time when you need to create a Credit Memo. Typically, this is done for customers where you have an ongoing relationship, and they have terms. This is usually done in a situation where it is easier to simply provide the customer credit on their account, because of something that went wrong in the order process, or for other reasons. Credit memos can be found under Transactions, Customers then Issue Credit Memo. Let’s go ahead and issue one now. I can pick my customer, I’ll stick with this ACM Group. Now I can fill out the information in this form to issue the credit memo. For this transaction a Location is required, so I’ll fill that in at the top. I can select the product I am issuing this credit memo for down here, and after filling in any more information I need to I can choose to save the transaction. None of these transactions are particularly difficult. Depending on your business you may have customers who need statements generated for them. Either on demand, or periodically. You can generate statements on demand by going to Transactions, Customers and selecting Individual Statements. From here you can select the customer who’s statement you want to print, and then click print to print it. If you have multiple customers you need to print statements for, you can go to Transactions, Customers, and click Generate Statements. Here you can select the customers you want to generate statements for, and print them in a batch. The last piece I want to cover is generating price lists. Price lists for customers can be generated by going to Transactions, Customers, then clicking Generate Price Lists. From this screen, we can select one or multiple customers, and either print, or email pricing lists to them. Pricing is controlled on items themselves, and you can have different price levels apply to different customers. In this way, you can have different pricing for different customers. We will talk more about items and pricing when we talk about inventory later on, but since this video is specifically about customers it is at least good to know where to go to print price lists. This video, and the previous one, provided an overview of the order to cash process, and should give you a solid foundation of how sales are done in NetSuite. Of course, there are more customer type transactions, and lots of variations on the order to cash process, but those are for a different course.