We have introduced a few recent changes to assist with customer credit and I will discuss them and techniques for managing customer credit in this article.

Billing Review

The Noviship system records transactions for each billable event.  Transactions are automatically created when these events occur:

• Shipments are submitted to carriers
• Shipments are (re-)assigned to customers
• Corrections are Approved
• Pending Shipments are Approved
• Billable Pickups are Booked

There are also Manual Transactions that are entered by administrators directly into a customer account.

Transactions accumulate on customer accounts but only qualify for billing when they are reconciled.  Shipment transactions are considered reconciled when the shipment is marked reconciled and is not in a pending state.  This happens automatically during EDI reconciliation.  Non-Shipment transactions are always considered reconciled.

When an invoice is posted for a customer, reconciled un-posted transactions are posted to the invoice.  This leads to a number of balances that we record :-

• The Transactional Balance is the sum of all transactions on an account.  This is a good indicator of activity but not credit in itself because some of those transactions will never be reconciled.  For example, if a customer submits a shipment to a carrier but it is never picked up it will never appear on a carrier bill.
• The Unreconciled Balance is the sum of all unreconciled transactions within the last 30 days.  We presume that if a carrier hasn’t billed a shipment in 30 days that it probably won’t be billed.  Therefore this is a useful way to monitor what we expect to bill the customer in the near future.  It is also the best way to control short-term credit.
• The Invoice Balance is the sum of all posted, unpaid invoices.  This is a good measure of the effective credit for a customer because it takes into account pre-payment and post-payment methods.
• The Posting Balance (displayed as the Invoice column in the customer list) shows what will appear on the invoice if it is immediately posted.
• We have introduced a new balance called Estimated Debt which is the sum of the Unreconciled Balance, Invoice Balance and Posting Balance.  This represents what we believe the customer owes at any instance.

Setting Limits

In the customer properties page you can an Unreconciled Shipment Credit Limit  and a general Credit Limit.  The Unreconciled Shipment Credit Limit puts a cap on the Unreconciled Balance while the general Credit Limit puts a cap on the Estimated Debt.  Setting these to zero implies that there is no limit.  Setting them to “1” is approximate to having a zero limit.

If a customer attempts to submit a shipment which would bring either of these balances over the given limits, the shipment will be refused indicating they would exceed their credit limits.

You can set either or both of these but they server slightly different purposes.  Capping the Unreconciled Balance can prevent customers from shipping high numbers or values of shipments quickly without any checks while still granting them a much higher long-term credit through the general Credit limit.

Post-Payment

Generally you will be invoicing your customer and receiving payment at a later date.  When you receive a payment you should use the Pay Invoice button on the Invoicing page.  See Invoice Payments for more information.  If you do not indicate that the payment has been received then the system will not be able to properly measure credit.  In a Post-Payment model your invoices will generally be greater than a zero amount.

Pre-Payment

In cases where you do not wish to extend credit to a customer you can use a pre-payment model.  You exercise this by setting the general Credit Limit to “1” or some small number.  Do not use zero as this indicates that the credit system is not being used.  Do not set the unreconciled limit to “1” as this will effectively disable all shipping.

When you receive a pre-payment from a customer you will need to enter this as a Manual Transaction.  You should use the Adjustment category (not Bill Payment) and the amount should be negative and tax-free.  Because the transaction is an Adjustment it does not need to be reconciled.  This means it contributes to the Posting Balance.

 

Ensure that Enable Credit Notes is un-checked.  Credit Notes are a means to issue negative invoices but that does not work with the pre-payment model.

When Credit Notes are disabled if you post a negative invoice (which would usually be the case) a Credit-Carry Forward transaction is created to raise the invoice amount to zero and a reverse is created on posting for the next invoice.  The customer’s pre-payment is therefore reduced with each invoice.

 

The system is able to import contacts into customer address books from a variety of formats.  This tutorial will take you through the process of importing a basic CSV file containing contacts which applies to most cases.

Examine your File

Open the file you have in Notepad or a text editor to check that it looks similar to the illustration.  A CSV file is a “Comma Separated Value” file where each line contains one contact and each field is separated by a comma and always in the same order.  Often there is a header line at the start.  This is the type of file that can be easily exported from Excel.  Sometimes you will see quotes around each value and that is fine too.

You will need the following columns in the file for basic importing:

• A column for the country code.  This is the ISO-3166 code for each country (“CA” for Canada, “US” for the United States, “GB” for the United Kingdom, etc).
• A column for the province or state code (at least for Canadian and American addresses).  For example, “QC” for Quebec, “NY” for New York, etc.
• A column for the city
• A column for the Postal Code or ZIP code (for countries where this is used)
• A single column for the contact name.  If you have separate columns for First and Last names that’s OK as long as they are in that order.  You can use Excel to reverse them if necessary.
• A single column for the company name.
• A single column for each line of the street address.

If your file contains more than 500 contacts, you should use Excel to split the file into parts so that each file contains fewer.  The number of contacts you can import at once is determined by your browser and computer specifications so you can experiment.

Create an Address Book

You will need to be impersonating your customer so that when you click on Home | Address Books you see their address books and not your own.  (Otherwise you’ll import the contacts into your own account.)

You should create a new address book for the import in case you need to repeat the process.  This way you can delete the entire address book in one step.

 

In Home | Address Books click New Address Book and label it appropriately.

Importing the Contacts

Then in Home | Address Books click Import Contacts to begin.

The next page will ask you to select the target address book and select the format.  In this tutorial we will be using the “Customer CSV” format which will suit most cases.  Only use one of the other formats if you know your file is in exactly that format.

Upload the file and click Submit to proceed.

You will now see a table containing all the entries in this file.  If the file is large, this may take some time.  Remember to split large files into 500 to 1000 contacts at a time.

In this page you will need to assign a label to each column of data you wish to import.  You do this by scrolling to the column and clicking the drop-down at the top then selecting the appropriate field.

Important Columns: Always select Country Code for the two character country code column.  You don’t need to use the “Country” column.  Always select Province Code for the two character province or state column.  You don’t need to use the “Province” column.

Un-check any lines you don’t want to import such as the header.

If you need to adjust specific data you can click on the cell to edit it.

When you are happy with the data, click Import Selection to begin.  As each contact is imported the checkbox will be removed.

You should now see the completed import list with ticks showing successful imports.

When the job is done you can click on another menu link to leave.