Invoice and Bill Adjustments

Perhaps the biggest change in CMS 5.0 is the way that adjustments to invoices and bills are handled after posting. These changes were designed to prevent problems such as discrepancies between CMS and your accounting software (caused by changes to invoices and bills after synchronizing), and invalid payment situations (such as payments applied to different customers or vendors than their related invoices or bills, and overpayments with no audit trail).

In order to make a change a posted invoice or bill that affects accounting, users must now explicitly choose "File-->Modify" before they will be able to make the change. Fields that are synchronized with accounting or affect financial reports are considered "restricted" fields. If you change any restricted fields on a posted record that has been synchronized to accounting or paid, then the current record will be reversed, and an adjustment record will be created. If you only change non-restricted fields (such as the invoice received date or invoice postmarked date on a bill), then the record will be directly modified and no adjustments will be created.

As an example, if a user opens posted invoice "373" that has been exported to QuickBooks, and changes the total amount from $1000 to $1500 and clicks save, you will end up with the following in your CMS database:


The advantage to this functionality is that to export these changes to accounting, CMS simply needs to export two new invoices, and any past invoices that may have occurred within a closed period will not be modified. If we make a second adjustment to this invoice on Feb 1st, and change the amount to $800.00, then the following will be the result:

Notice that CMS leaves you with an audit trail of all changes to this invoice after posting. Furthermore, if you attempt to open invoice 373, CMS will open the latest version of the record automatically (in this case INV-373-A2), so you always know what the total invoice amount is.

We feel that this change is one of the most significant of our 5.0 offering, and many customers who have switched to 5.0 have found that it significantly reduces synchronization errors and inconsistencies between CMS and their accounting software. Please call us if you have any questions about this change and one of our friendly customer service staff will be happy to explain further.