Credit Sales: Invoice and Collect

Raise, invoice and collect a credit sale

Steps 3 to 7 of the credit sales workflow: raise the order, invoice it, know what you are owed, take the payment and apply it, and change the amount owed when you have to. It follows Steps 1 and 2, where you set the customer up for credit and checked their exposure yourself.

Read what credit control in BigLedger actually is before you rely on any limit: unless the optional check is on, nothing at FINAL stops the order that takes a customer over their limit, and there is no approval step for a sales document, so the control is who holds the FINAL permission. If FINAL is refused because the customer is blacklisted, do not run the sweep to clear it without your stop list in hand: its first act is to clear every blacklist flag in the tenant, including the stops a person set by hand.

Step 3: raise the order.
Step 4: invoice.
Step 5: know what you are owed.
Step 6: take the payment and apply it.
Step 7: when the amount owed needs to change.

The running example is GadgetSphere’s distribution arm selling on account to an IT reseller on Net 30 with a RM 150,000 credit limit. This month’s order is 24 flagship smartphones at RM 3,800: RM 91,200 net, RM 5,472 SST at 6%, RM 96,672.

Step 3: Raise the order

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > Sales Order > Create

Standard order entry — the same as the Standard Sales Workflow. The two things that matter for a credit sale:

Credit terms and due date on Main Details. These carry to the invoice. Check them rather than assuming; a customer whose terms changed last quarter will still show the old ones if nobody updated the record.
The customer’s purchase order number in Reference. On a credit sale this is not optional housekeeping. It is what their accounts payable department will match against, and a missing reference is the commonest reason an invoice sits unpaid for an extra month.

SAVE, then FINAL. No deposit is collected — that is the point of a credit sale.

Step 4: Invoice

Finance > Sales Invoice (Internal) > Sales Invoice > Create > KO For > Sales Order

The outcome: the receivable exists and the clock starts.

Knock off the sales order, check the date and the branch, check the E-Invoice tab if you are registered with LHDN, and press FINAL.

Dr  Debtor — trade retail                RM 96,672.00
    Cr  Sales — smartphones                       RM 91,200.00
    Cr  SST output tax                            RM  5,472.00

Twenty-four handsets leave the location at their moving-average cost, and the customer now owes RM 96,672, due in thirty days. No cost-of-sales line posts with the invoice — that is a month-end journal from the Financial Report applet, as the Standard Sales Workflow explains.

If FINAL is refused with “Customer is blacklisted…”, either the sweep has flagged them or somebody set the flag by hand. In practice the sweep only ever flags for being over the limit, so that is where to look first, and the right next step is a conversation with the customer, not with the system. Once the debt is settled, clear the flag on the customer record (or run the sweep again, which will clear it automatically if the arrears are gone).

Step 5: Know what you are owed

Finance > Debtor Report Applet, and Finance > Statement of Account Applet

The outcome: a list you can act on, every Monday morning.

Debtor Report Applet — the ageing. Who owes what, in which bucket. This is the working list for collections.
Statement of Account Applet — one customer’s full history: every invoice, credit note, receipt and contra. This is what you send a customer who disputes the balance.

Chase from the ageing, not from memory. A customer whose invoice is eight days past terms is a phone call; the same customer at sixty days is a different conversation and possibly a stop on further sales.

Step 6: Take the payment and apply it

Finance > Receipt Voucher (Internal) > Internal RCT Voucher > Create

The outcome: the invoice cleared, not just the money banked.

Create the voucher, pick the customer, add a Settlement line for the amount and the method, then — and this is the step people skip — open the Contra tab and tick the invoices this payment settles.

A receipt with no contra is an unapplied credit. The cash is in the bank and the invoice is still sitting on the ageing report as overdue. Press FINAL, then open the invoice’s ARAP tab: Outstanding reads 0.00. Doc Open Amount does not fall, because it is the invoice’s own total and a contra never changes it.

Which invoices the payment settles is your choice. BigLedger does not decide it. For a receipt keyed on this screen, nothing matches it to invoices by itself, not at FINAL and not afterwards. (A receipt created by a file import or an integration carries whatever matching that route supplies.) The Contra tab lists this customer’s open documents in this company, oldest transaction date first. When you tick one, BigLedger proposes the smaller of its balance and what is left of the receipt. You can change the amount before you add it.

If your administrator has switched on AUTO_SETTLE_CONTRA (the screen shows that name) in the receipt applet’s Application Settings, the list also has a Total Amount box and an AUTO SETTLE button. Type the amount received and it fills the list from the top down: oldest transaction date first, until the money runs out. Three things it does not do:

It does not read the customer’s remittance advice. If the customer says “this RM 38,000 is for invoices 1041 and 1052”, auto-settle may put it against 1017 instead. On the ageing, 1041 and 1052 still look unpaid, and the customer says they paid them. Match by hand whenever the customer names the invoices.
It goes by invoice date, not due date. For a customer on mixed terms, the oldest invoice is not always the most overdue.
It only looks at this company. A payment meant to cover a customer’s invoices at two companies is two receipts, one at each company.

The job belongs to whoever keys receipts. They do it on the day the money is keyed, with the remittance advice in front of them, and send a payment with no remittance to the credit controller rather than guessing. They know they got it right when the receipt no longer appears on the Outstanding Document Report and every invoice the customer named reads Outstanding 0.00 on its ARAP tab. Once a week, before the Monday collections list, the credit controller runs the Outstanding Document Report for every company. A receipt that was never fully applied appears there as its own row with a negative balance. Each one is either money waiting to be matched or a customer’s credit to be agreed. Nothing on that report should be a receipt older than a week.

Part payments work the same way: contra the amount received against the invoice, and the remainder stays open with the original due date.

Bank charges taken out of the transfer go on the Expenses tab of the voucher, so that the amount you contra matches the invoice and the shortfall is booked as a cost rather than leaving a stubborn RM 15 balance on the customer’s account forever.

Step 7: When the amount owed needs to change

Two situations, two different documents, and picking the wrong one is how stock records drift.

Situation	Document	What it does
You overbilled, agreed a retrospective discount, or need to write a balance off — nothing comes back	Sales Credit Note (Internal)	Reduces the receivable. Quantity signum 0 — it never touches stock
The customer is sending goods back	Sales Return (Internal)	Reduces the receivable and brings the stock back in

A credit note sits on the customer’s account until you either contra it against an open invoice or pay it out. Contra is the usual answer for a credit customer, and the contra’s own date decides which month-end ageing counts the credit. Tick the invoice on the credit note’s Contra tab and press ADD, and the contra is dated the day you key it unless you type a Contra Date (or it takes the credit note’s own date, if your administrator has switched on CONTRA_DATE_SAME_AS_DOC_DATE_TXN). Apply it from the Debtor Report instead and there is no date to type: it is the day you key it. Either way it is never earlier than the later of the two documents, because a contra dated before that is moved forward to that date when it is saved. The live ageing reflects it immediately; a month that has already ended counts it only if its month-end falls on or after the Contra Date, as Step 6 of the payment collection guide shows for a receipt.

For a full walk-through of both, see Returns and Exchanges.

What success looks like for this part

Once the invoice is paid and the receipt is contra’d against the whole of it, the invoice’s ARAP tab reads Outstanding 0.00, the invoice has left the ageing on the Debtor Report, and the customer’s Statement of Account shows the invoice, the receipt and any credit note in order. After a part payment, Outstanding reads the remainder, still due on the original date, and the invoice stays in the ageing until it is paid. The whole task’s success check, with the question that closes your credit-control gap, is on the first page.

Common mistakes in this part

Three of the task’s mistakes belong to these steps: treating a blacklist as a system error, raising a credit note for returned goods, and finalising receipts without contra. Two more guard the order you raise in Step 3: believing the credit limit stops anything, and waiting for an approval that is never coming. The sixth, the wrong AR type, belongs to Step 1; all six are under Common mistakes on the first page.