Options for NOT printing Statements for customers with nil balance.

SOLVED

I have a client using Quantum 2014 and offered to do their customer statement print-outs today. I ended up having to do a summary aged receivable listing in order to only select customers with a balance to do the statements for. Due to the nature of their business there are hundreds of customers but only about 40% have a balance as of June30/14. I could not see any options to not print out statements for customer that have a nil balance.

Am I missing something somewhere or is there really no option to select 'do not print for customers with nil balance'?

  • 0
    verified answer

    Statement days option in Setup, Settings, Receivables, Options.  Set it to zero if you only wish to see statements that have a non-zero balance and it will not show fully paid invoices, even if they were paid today.  Then you can use the select all button when printing statements.

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    Thanks Richard - that does work - too bad I can't show the paid invoices within 30 days but is far quicker than the method I used.

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    Have you tried putting in 30 instead of zero?

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    I did do that but still too many nil customers - only cus they paid in full within the 30 days. So really it is working the way it is set up - client doesn't want to send out the nil balances - the ratio works out to roughly 40% of customers paid in full resulting in nil balance. In a slow month with 200 customers 80 of them will have paid in full with last 30 days resulting in a nil balance. I should be getting email addresses from all the customers and having them sent out via email - then no worries about handling papers, envelopes, and stamps - or nil balances!

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    I personally never recommend sending statements to people when there is no balance, unless the customer asks.  I also never recommend regularly using anything other than zero, again, unless a customer asks for a statement with all that information.  If they don't get a statement, they don't owe.  If they get a statement, then they only owe what is on it.  If something is not on it this month but was on it last month, then your client received payment for it.

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    True - I don't like getting nil balance stmts myself so I don't send out nil balances. As for sending out stmts to include invoices paid within 30 days - it is something I like to set up do for some clients. Some customers make errors in their payments so seeing how clients processed their payment makes it easier to customers to reconcile the difference rather than just showing one invoice that was originally 120.44 and now only showing as 10.25 becus that is the amount that was shortpaid.

    I do understand why it would be complicated to set up an option to "do not show nil balance" when request made to show pmt in last 30 days.

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    Unknown said:
    ...to reconcile the difference rather than just showing one invoice that was originally 120.44 and now only showing as 10.25 becus that is the amount that was shortpaid.

    I'm not sure I understand your point here.  The last time I printed a statement that included a short paid invoice (2 minutes ago), the invoice in full showed, the next line was the payment and the next line was the balance owing.  I've done custom statements to change that but that is the default.

    Unknown said:
    I do understand why it would be complicated to set up an option to "do not show nil balance" when request made to show pmt in last 30 days.

    To me I would think this would be easy for the programmers.  They put in the Do Not Show Zero Balances on the financials a few years ago.  It could be just another checkbox on the statement printing dialog.

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    Thanks Richard- if easy to put in the do not show nil balances then I would prefer that. Hopefully someone has entered that idea in the idealscale.

    I will have to try what you said about the short payment to see how that shows. I normally don't print off the customer statements since clients do it themselves. But if that is the case then that is even better.

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    Unfortunately, I have a rather pessimistic view on the usefulness of the new IdeaScale.  I think Shakespeare wrote a play about it.  It was the same with IdeaScope.

    As for the partial payment, just post a partial one in Universl and preview the standard internal sfm form.  Play with the statement days and you will see what I mean.  Some people have preferred to set the statement days at 7 so anything mailed and received in the last week is shown as paid.  However, for some customer accounts, that still produces several pages of a statement that is wasting paper.  As you have said though, if sent through email, it is easier as the end customer can print only the pages required.  I think I've done a couple of custom statements a few years ago that monkey with this stuff but it is not part of the program functions.

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    Did you mean that IdeaScope is full of sound and fury about Sage's absurd screen font choices?

    If Sage would add a redundant field to tcustr for 'balance' it would make querying for balances of invoices easier.   Adding it to titlu or titrec as well, would make printing it easy, too.

    If I can put together a query to pick out just the invoices with a balance, then there's surely no reason that an actual programmer couldn't, especially with access to the code in the aging reports.

  • 0 in reply to RandyW

    Yes - there are lots Sage could do, but - in their infinite wisdom - it is much more important to move the direct deposit stubs numbering option (both vendors and employees) over to the Settings -> Company-> Forms along with other forms such as invoices and receipts. To keep these numbering options together with the 'next cheque nbr' box in Reports and Forms just would not be logical thinking.

    Or how about this - to learn how to set up project module in Sage Quantum just go into Help and select Project - there it will tell you the go into the Home window on the Setup menu, Choose Settings then Company then Features, and select the Project box - which is not there - because it is only logical that you would know to have to go into Setup, User Preference, then View, then click on Project to select it. I was at a potential client the other day and was trying to show them the benefit of using projects but unable to figure out where it was - but you see, I was not being logical about it.

  • 0 in reply to RandyW

    Randy,

    IdeaScope, I believe is dead and replaced with IdeaScale.  At least they are trying to keep the "idea" of allowing us to help them design a better program.

    Unknown said:

    As for keeping balances in the database, I am sure you are aware that you are encroaching on the idea of good database normalisation.  Of course, when I asked the head programmer back in the early 2000's if he knew the definition of the term, he fell off his chair laughing.

    Seriously, I am not sure keeping a balance is a good idea.  the tCusTrDt already holds the AmountOwing but only as of the time of the payment, so it never indicates a zero balance.  I agree that the SQL is possible and a checkbox to activate the honouring of the result would be all that is needed.  I'm sure I have the query here somewhere as well and it could be added to another query to return the result as a "balance field".  It does make for a complex debug session when testing but run speed should not be an issue.

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    smithco,

    Not a good day to get me started.  I think this might take your thread further off topic than it has already gone anyway.

  • 0 in reply to Richard S. Ridings

    Sage appears to have remained focused on marketing to accounting firms and consultants, because it's what they know.  

    Little thought and even less effort seems to go toward operational issues - getting data in, and printing statements are way down on the priority list, compared to year-end financial reporting.  

    And IdeaScale?  Where they drop everything and get right to work on thinking about considering allowing you to post, after about 6-9 months? 

    Surely someone at Sage already knows that this:

    is not as useful as this:

    To me, this is just one, of hundreds of examples where Sage does not give a rat's posterior about the end user of their software.  They keep trying to use a 'Fortune 500' strategy to make and sell software for small business, as if the financial people were the only stakeholders.  

    Important, in their magical alternate universe, is to rename three unrelated products for marketing reasons.  (ooohhhh look, now it's used in over 500,000 businesses!!) 

    Unimportant to Sage, but highly important to me, is not looking like an idiot when a customer calls to ask how their order was billed, or being able to print an invoice with the balance owing at the bottom, or being able to select items with filters instead of control-clicks. 

    (And... not going to Summit to watch their senior clown-secutives clap each other on the back for their fine work.)

  • 0 in reply to RandyW

    Sage lost one of their customer to another software due to inability to get what they want out of Sage for both POS, Inventory, and accounting - however client still keeping me around - bookkeeping is bookkeeping no matter what software is being used, it's just the ease that one can do it with.

  • 0 in reply to RandyW

    Somewhere along the line, they forgot that a good product is their best marketing.  Because Sage decided when they took over, to be a follower in the market, instead of a leader, they have not done much.

    Alot of what you are showing in the QB dialog, I have done with different versions of Crystal templates for Simply/Sage 50 users when needed.  That ability alone is why I still think Sage 50 is a far better program than the others.  It has flexibility and ease of add-on capabilities.  My own invoice template has a Paid stamp on the printout when I reprint an invoice that has been paid.

    As smithco mentions, we don't do a lot of customer statements, but in the 18 years or so that I have been working with QB, I had never seen that dialog and it just took me 2 minutes to find it.  That tells me my Simply/Sage 50 clients are more sophisticated in running their businesses than my QB clients.