To calculate Interest on your Customer Statements requires that you first enter the A/R Interest calculation information in your Company Configuration:
- Select menu path [System / Configure / Company / Settings]
- Enter values for:
- A/R Interest Rate – enter annual interest % rate
- A/R Minimum Charge – enter a minimum charge amount, if applicable
- A/R Charge After – enter the number of days past due before interest is to be charged
- Press [CTRL+END] to save your changes.
If you have customers that have different settings than what you have defined at the Company level, you may override their settings by selecting [Datafile / Customer / View] and changing the settings under the 'Interest' section of the specific customer record.
Next you need to consider how and when to charge interest when preparing your customer statements. This has two elements to ensure that the program only calculates Interest once a month and not every time you run a Customer Statement Prepare. This also means that you can run the Statement/Prepare step multiple times while you check and balance the customer accounts to ensure that they are correct before generating and printing the final statements. Once you are satisfied that the customer accounts are correct, you then turn on the Interest Calculation settings and perform one final Statement/Prepare which will generate the interest charges. You then proceed to print and send out your customer statements:
Statement Finish
To indicate that you have closed off the previous month, you need to run [Datafile / Customer / Report / Statement / Finish]. This indicates to the system that the previous month is Finalized and that interest can be charged during the next Statement Prepare provided that the Calculate Interest Statement Configuration option has been set to 'Y-Yes'.
'Calculate Interest' Statement Configuration Setting
The 'Calculate Interest' statement configuration setting found under [Datafile / Customer / Report / Statement / Prepare] is the trigger for the program to Calculate or Not Calculate interest when you run that specific Statement Prepare. You should leave this setting at 'N-No' until you are satisfied that your customer account balances are correct and that you are now ready to calculate interest and print your customer statements. Change this setting to 'Y-Yes' to charge interest.