Accounts Receivable

Trading Terms Maintenance

Customer Trading Terms Code

Trading Terms code can be numeric or alpha (or a combination).

It is often descriptive e.g. ‘C’ for ‘cash’, ‘7’ for 7 days, ’30N’ for 30 days from invoice date.

For details on the use of “codes”, see The Role of “Codes” in Online Advantage

Standard Terms

This shows the Trading Terms designated as the ‘Standard Trading Terms’ for your business in System Options. You can override those standard terms per Customer Account if you need to give specific customers extended terms, or if you need more control and less risk through shorter terms.

Trading Terms Short Name

Enter brief text (up to 10 characters) to describe the trading terms. The short name is used on reports and screens where space is limited.

Trading Terms Name

Enter text to describe the trading terms. This is shown when selecting terms to apply to customer accounts. Note: this description is also printed on the standard Online Advantage invoice to indicate your trading terms to the Customer.
For more details on descriptions, see The Role of “Names & Descriptions” in Online Advantage

Type Code

Select the type of trading term.

The trading terms type is used by the Sales Order Entry module to perform credit checks. Outstanding invoices for the debtor are analysed to determine if the debtor has exceeded the trading terms set out under this code. Using the Nett method, the invoice date is used to determine when an invoice is due for payment whilst the Month End method rounds all outstanding invoices up to the last day of the month for the month they were invoiced, and uses that date to determine when the invoice is due.

No. of Days for Credit Checking

Enter the number of days credit you want to provide a customer using this trading terms code, before their orders will be placed on credit stop.
Note that this number of days is on top of the date calculation made by the Type Code. For instance, an invoice dated March 13th, and a trading terms code with a 49 day credit check will see the customer’s orders placed on credit stop on until May 2nd using the Nett method, whilst using the Month End method the credit stop will not come in to effect until May 19th.

Terms Type

Select from:

  • Cash
  • Cash on Delivery
  • Credit

Giving the trading term a specific type allows us to use it to control software behaviour for trading terms. For example, for ‘COD’ terms, the ‘Limit to one delivery at a time’ prompt below is relevant and the input is enabled when that term type is selected. Another example of use is that we do not offer a ‘Pay Later’ option in e-commerce if the customer’s terms are ‘Cash’.

Limit to one delivery at a time

This option is for ‘Cash on Delivery’ (COD) terms only.

If a Customer is set to COD ‘credit limit’ and the Trading Terms has this option selected, then only one delivery at a time may be in progress for the Customer. If an order or invoice is outstanding for the Customer, then subsequent orders are placed on credit hold and must be released from credit hold before a second invoice can be produced.

This prevents a customer from making multiple orders and thus building up an ‘account’ balance. It also allows you to combine deliveries to save costs.

Override Mandatory/Optional Customer Order Number

If this option is selected, the mandatory/optional behaviour for the ‘Customer Order Number’ prompt in Sales Orders for Customers that are using this Trading Terms setting will be the inverse of the system wide setting in System Options.

If left unselected, the mandatory/optional behaviour will match the system wide setting – or the User Details override setting if present.

For example, you can set up the system so that a Customer Order Number is not required to be input in Sales Order entry, but you can override that by saying that customers trading under ’30 day terms’ must have a Customer Order Numbered entered on the Sales Orders.

Document History Note Retention

Under the Notes Category function you can specify the retention period for notes recorded under the system category ‘DH-Document History’. An override retention period is provided here in Trading Terms because Document History for Cash customer accounts can be of a higher volume than other account customers if you are operating in a counter sales environment. This override allows you to enter a shorter retention period of Document History for customers using the trading term.

For the purposes of simplicity, a year is treated as 365 days and a month as 30 days. No leap year or variable month days are taken into account for retention purposes.

For example, if you have a customer who makes one purchase a month, then over a year, the ‘document history’ for that customer will show 12 invoices and 12 statements (assuming you produce statements monthly). (Document history can be viewed under ‘Notes’ against the customer account). If you are selling to ‘cash’ customers over the counter, then the volume of documents generated against the ‘cash’ customer is significantly higher – let’s say 280 invoices per month. When viewing the document history for the customer with the low volume of sales, you may want to see 2 years back, so you would set the retention period for this customer to 2 years. For the cash customer, they are likely to be one-off sales, so you may only want to ever look at the last month of documents, so you would set the retention period for the cash trading terms to 30 days.

By reducing the retention period on cash terms the system becomes more responsive because there is a lower volume of data to process.

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