Posting Invoices

When using the Accounts Payable application, you spend most of your time posting invoices from vendors. You can post parts of an invoice to more than one profit center, business period, or general ledger account. You can post vendor invoices, create invoices from purchase orders, post credit memos, and create auto-pay invoices.

To begin posting, you must specify the following batch information in the Batch Information dialog box:

batch number
general ledger control number
posting date
business period
fiscal year.

You then select the vendor. You can retrieve vendors by using the vendor's ID, Name or Contact. You can also use the Vendor Query dialog box to search for vendors.

Next, you specify the invoice or credit memo information, and any notes, and complete the posting procedure.

Posting A/P Credit Memos

There are times when you receive merchandise from a vendor which is damaged or which must be returned. In this case, you can create a credit memo. Credit memos can be applied to a vendor's account, either to a specific invoice or as an open credit. The balance owed to that vendor is reduced by the amount of each credit memo. When you print checks, all invoices paid by those checks are shown. Each check amount is for the balance due on the corresponding invoice. As checks are released, the applied credit memos are marked as completed.

When specifying a G/L control number in the G/L Control # box, you must use the same G/L number to which invoices for this vendor are posted.

Creating Auto-Pay Invoices

If you have regular monthly expenses, such as rent or utility payments, you can automatically generate invoices for these expenses. This is called auto-pay. Before you can create auto-pay invoices, you must first enter auto-pay information for each auto-pay vendor. For more information about creating auto-pay vendors, see the online help topic Adding an Auto-Pay Vendor.

DDMS recommends generating all auto-pay invoices for the coming month just after completing the month-end procedures. This ensures that all auto-pay invoices are generated each month and are posted to the correct business period.

A/P Specials

Specials let you add explanatory messages to convey information about a particular vendor account or an invoice. By using the vendor A/P special, you can provide your employees with special instructions about a vendor when they are posting invoices. For example, if your accounts payable department has any questions about an invoice, you can include a contact name and number from the vendor's accounts payable department. This eliminates the time it takes to research this information.

An invoice A/P special is also a helpful communications tool. For example, you can include information on the invoice that would notify the accounts payable department not to pay an invoice until all items are received.

For more information about posting invoices in the Accounts Payable Posting window, see the online help topic Posting A/P Invoices.

There are four steps to posting a vendor's invoice:

Select the vendor.
Specify the batch information.
Specify the invoice information.
Post the information.