Q&A of the Month--A/P Aging

Q. My A/P Aging Report doesn't match my User Defined (UD) Report for the A/P ledger account, and when I run a detail report option 7 there are a lot of unmatched entries. What is going on?

A. Several things are possible. First, check the date range of the report. All A/P invoices should have due dates, and when running the Aging Report the date range needs to look far enough in the future to include these dates, otherwise it will not match the UD Report. The date range for both the Aging and the UD R

Next run the A/P Detail Report using option 7 (Invoices with Payments), making sure that the date range begins with the date of the earliest invoice date on the invoice for which the payments have been made. For example, if you received money on 7/1/09 for an invoice that had an invoice date of 5/1/06 you would need to open up your date range to include 5/1/06 so that you have an invoice to match the payment up with. In doing so, you can see the unmatched entries and look for errors, mismatched vendors, invoice # typos, double payments, etc. The errors or unmatched entries will be shown in orange. Fix the errors that are shown; overpayments can be fixed by putting in a dummy invoice for the amount and then entering a credit invoice.

Some things to look for:

• Payments entered as a check (or deposit) entry instead of through the A/P payment routine.
• Vendors or invoice numbers that don't match. For example, if the invoice was to "ABC Farm" and you applied the payment to "Abc Farm," the system will consider these two different vendors. Or if the invoice number was typed in as "12345" and when paying with a check it was entered as "012345," again the system will not match up to two entries because of the variation in the invoice numbers.
• If a payment or invoice is altered or edited it could cause it to unlink. Along those same lines if there was a change to the amount due field after a payment was made, resulting in an overpayment, you would see an unmatched entry. The last few things to keep in mind are that if data recovery was run on another machine which didn't have the year's data that contained the original invoice or that entries were made on an older version of FBS software, a version which allowed the description on payment to be changed. If data recovery was then run on the newer version the link would be removed because of invoice numbers no longer matching. The system will also flag an entry if you have an invoice that has been open for a long period of time, say several years, there may not be a problem with the entry, but the system will still flag it because it has been outstanding for so long.
  
  After the errors are fixed, Run Utilities Recover Bad Data for all the years that were edited and then re-run the A/P Detail Report using option 7 to match up all the entries correctly. Once you have all of the unmatched entries cleared up, rerun your Aging Report. If it’s still not correct, drill down to the source entries drilling down into the entries and check for the following:
  
• Make sure that you don't have an invoice dated after the due date (for example, an invoice dated for 6/30/09 and a due date as 1/15/09).
• Check that the beginning balance of the current year matches the previous year’s ending balance.
  
  Here are a few tips to avoid A/P and A/R errors :
  
• Always use the Pay A/P Entries for writing checks or the A/R Money Received for recording deposits rather than going through the standard Checks or Deposits screens.
• Be aware of your invoice and due dates; for the Aging Report to work correctly these dates need to be recorded and they need to be correct.
• When selecting vendors during A/P or A/R Invoice entry maker sure there are not duplicate vendors with similar names.
• Get into the routine of running the A/P and A/R Detail Reports using Option 7 on a regular basis to trap unmatched entries and errors to correct them in a timely manner instead of allowing them to accumulate.