Customer Penalties

To access this operation go to the customers area and from the menu select Tools|Issue Penalties.

Use this utility for charging account maintenance or late payment fees.

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Remove Penalties

Tick to remove all penalties previously issued within the current month.

Category

Enter an account category to issue penalties to, or leave blank for all accounts.

Account Code

Enter a specific account code or click on to select from a list if you wish to issue penalties to only one account.

Transaction Type

The transaction type of the penalty. This is normally an "adjustment" although if you intend to regularly issue penalties, a "penalty" transaction type could be defined in the INSTALLATION Workshop program.

Reference

The reference to appear on the penalty. This generally appears on your customer statements under the reference column.

Issue Date

The date of issue of the penalty.

The account's ageing is based on this date. Your issue date should therefore be the same as or as close as possible to your actual system date.

If this principle is not adhered to, you may over penalize your accounts. Keep in mind that CAPITAL does not "see" transactions as existing beyond the issue date, whether those transactions are payments or not.

Terms

The account terms to issue penalties to. The default is 30 days, so all accounts with 30 day terms are checked for penalty issues. If the terms are changed, ageing periods are automatically adjusted to reflect this.

The terms specified here must match the terms of the accounts to be issued penalties. For example, if you wish to issue penalties for your 14 day accounts and your 30 day accounts, you will need to run this operation twice. The first time you would specify 30 as the terms, the second time 14.

Minimum Charge

Enter a minimum charge that must apply for a penalty to be issued. For example, if 1 was entered here, a fee would only be generated if the amount owed exceeded 1 dollar. Leave this option set to zero if you don't want minimum charges to be considered.

Current

The fixed amount or percentage to add to the amount in this period. If you are specifying a percentage be sure to add a % after the amount. Penalties are not, of course, normally issued for the current period, but you may wish to apply such things as administration or account maintenance fees.

For example, entering:

7.50

would allocate a $7.50 fee to each account that has transactions that are "current" days old. Entering:

3.5%

would assign a 3.5% charge on the total current amount. Negative amounts are not permitted.

The same applies to the fields 30 days, 60 days, 90+ days.

Transaction No

The transaction number of the penalty. If not specified, CAPITAL will use the next available transaction number for the selected transaction type.

For more information on setting up transaction numbers for transaction types see: Transaction Number Sequence Setup.

Hints & Tips

Discounts or fees should be issued just before you are about to print statements. If a mistake is made or you wish to remove the adjustments you have made for any reason, you may do so at the beginning of the operation. Removing a large number of adjustments may leave a set of transaction numbers "missing". For this reason it is a good idea to use a separate number series for penalty adjustments.
Entering ADJ in the Transaction No field will issue the next available number in the ADJ sequence automatically. E.g., This might be ADJ20231 if the last ADJ number was ADJ20230.
You should clean up your accounting records on a regular basis to ensure that any unallocated payments are allocated. For example, if you have a invoice in 90 days for $500, and an unallocated payment for $500 in 30 days, CAPITAL may incorrectly allocate a penalty to the 90 day account. The problem can be solved by simply allocating the $500 payment to its appropriate invoice. Since CAPITAL is an "open item" accounting system, you should endeavour to allocate payments against invoices whenever it is possible to do so. The Unallocated Customers Report can assist you with this procedure.
You may selectively include or exclude penalty issues for specific accounts by changing the Issue penalty setting on each customer record. For more information on this see the Customer Reference topic.

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