Setup a customer with multiple branch accounts but no head office account

One Customer payment paying off multiple branch customer accounts causes an issue

Customer accounts

You have a customer who has 4 shops. With your accounts software you have setup 4 customer accounts, one for each shop.

January transactions

In January each shop was invoiced for €200 worth of goods. In February a payment was received from the shops head office for €800. To enter this into the accounts software, the payment was split into four payment entries of €200 and allocated against the relevant sales invoice in each account.

Shop 1 Account (all accounts have exactly the same transactions)

February transactions

In February, Shop 4 returned €190 worth of goods as they were not selling in the shop. A credit note for €190 was issued to Shop 4.

In February Shops 1 to 3 were each invoiced for a further €100 worth of goods.

The debtors listing at the end of February looked like this:

In March the head office sends a payment for €110 to pay the outstanding invoices. But in addition to the payment, they are also using the credit note shop 4 received.

To allocate the payment and the credit note, the following daybook entries would need to be made.

Allocate Customer payment of €110

1 Mar 23 Customer payment of €100 allocated to Shop 1 1 Mar 23 Customer payment of €10 allocated to Shop 2

Allocate Shop 4 Credit note of €190

1 Mar 23 Sales Journal Debit of €190 allocated to Shop 4 1 Mar 23 Sales Journal Credit of €90 allocated to Shop 2 1 Mar 23 Sales Journal Credit of €100 allocated to Shop 3

Customer statement problem

There is no facility to create a customer statement combining the sales invoices, sales credit notes, customer payments and journals for the four shops combined.

How to make this easier

No Head Office account and multiple customer account codes

The example above, do not setup this way.

One customer account with multiple delivery addresses, one for each shop to choose from

This allows you to create a single combined customer transaction statement and allow you to enter the full customer payment into the account without the need to split the payment

Disadvantages

• You need to choose the correct delivery address each time a sales order is created.
• This does not work if a different sales rep is assigned to each shop, you can’t analyse the individual sales rep sales.
• You can’t analyse sales per shop, you can only analyse sales for the total group of shops.
• If the account codes do not run in sequence, then you can’t report on just this customers sales.

Example of non sequence shop codes

A head office account with multiple customer account codes linked to the head office

• This is the most flexible, but requires the most maintenance.
• Each account can have its own sales rep and its own delivery address can be added automatically to each transaction.
• The customer payment does not have to be split.
• Settlement discounts can also be easily allocated against each sales invoice.
• Credit notes can be allocated to any account.