About Purging Completed Invoices
You can purge (delete) paid invoices through the (O) Accounts Receivable Selectors and (OR) Accounts Receivable Reports screens. (Paid invoices have a balance of zero.) By purging the AR-MASTER file, you ensure this file contains only current information, which helps keep accounts receivable procedures fast and efficient.
The number of invoices you create and your business needs determines how often you should purge paid invoices. For example, if you frequently check customer accounts receivable activity, you may choose to leave a month's invoices in the current AR-MASTER file.
When you purge completed invoices, you can specify which paid invoices are purged by using a cutoff date. Paid invoices with dates on or before the cutoff date are purged. Paid invoices dated later than the cutoff date are kept. When determining which paid invoices are old enough to be purged, you can use either the invoice date or the last date when an entry was made for the invoice in A/R. The Purge By Latest Date field in the (LA2) A/R Parameters screen determines which date is used. If you set the Purge By Latest Date field to Y, the date when the last entry was made for an invoice is used as the cutoff date. If you leave this field blank or set it to N, the invoice date is used as the cutoff date.
Note: Purging is a month-end procedure. For more about month-end procedures, see About Month-End Procedures.
When purging invoices, three things occur:
The Completed Invoices Report prints. This report lists all of the invoices that are purged. It includes the following information for each invoice: customer, invoice number, date, total amount, and the number of days it took the customer to pay each invoice.
The purged invoices can be completely removed, or you can save them in an accounts receivable journal. The parameter Journalize Purged Invoices in the (LA2) A/R Parameters screen controls this option. To save purged invoices and any special text that was created for them, set this parameter to X. To save only the purged invoices, set the parameter to Y. To save your purge invoices, the system prompts you to name the file where the journalized invoices are stored. In most cases, you can accept the default journal name: JNL-AR. When you begin a new year, rename your JNL-AR file to reflect that year's invoices, JNL-04-AR, for example. This ensures that your JNL-AR file contains only the current year's data.
The Days box in the Customer History Total Sales tab is updated. This box shows the average number of days a customer takes to pay off an invoice.
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