Accounting in Noviship is actually fairly simple.  However it does not map precisely on to traditional accounting, partly because it is fundamentally simpler and because it is just a component in your organisation’s accounting process.

In Noviship there are only two objects involved in accounting: Transactions and Invoices.

An earlier article provided a quick introduction and this article expands on it.

FORUM DES DÉVELOPPEURS GATE.IO

Transactions are objects representing an amount of money.  Transactions identify the customer to whom the amount applies and also the type of the transaction.  There are three flavours of transactions: “Customer” (which affects the customer’s balance), “Reseller” (which affects the reseller’s balance) and “Cost” (which reflect charges billed by the carrier).

For accounting purposes, the flavour of transaction isn’t really important.  What you do need to know is that “Cost” transactions go on a “Cost” invoice while the rest go on a “Customer” invoice.

Noviship keeps a journal of all transactions.  Transactions cannot be edited or deleted once created.  Negating a transaction is accomplished by creating an equal negative transaction.

Transactions are created at several stages.  First when a shipment (or pickup or other billable object) is created and again when the price of the object is adjusted (typically during reconciliation).  There are also manual transactions which are created outside the scope of a billable objects.

Transactions are “billable” if they connect to a reconciled shipment in a billable state, for a billable customer.  So transactions for non-billing shipments or non-billing customers are not “billable”.

AMADEUS STEINS GATE IOS

Invoices are very simply a list of transactions.  Transactions can only be attached to a single invoice.  We call this step “Posting a transaction to an invoice”.  The amount on the invoice is simply the sum of all transactions attached to it.

Invoices are usually created by gathering all the billable transactions for a customer and attaching them to the new invoice object.  This is called “Posting an invoice”.  It is not the same as Posting to a Ledger in Accounting – it is just an expression that has a similar meaning.

Posting an invoice typically includes sending that invoice out as a PDF by e-mail to its recipient.  We have another operation called “Filing an Invoice” which is the same thing but no e-mail is generated.

We have a concept called “Reference Invoices“.  These are just invoices that are not meant to reach the customer.  We put transactions here that we don’t want to end up in the accounting system.  Remember that transactions cannot be deleted or modified so when we need to get rid of them, putting them in a Reference invoice is a good way to keep track.

CRÉER UN COMPTE GATE IO

The expression “Cancelling an Invoice” is very important to understand.  It doesn’t mean the customer isn’t going to pay it or that you want the invoice to go in the trash.  It specifically means the transactions are detached from the invoice and go back into the billing queue.  They are now available to be posted to future invoices.

The distinction is important.  If you cancel an invoice and post another invoice for the same customer the transactions will simply go on the new invoice instead.  Cancelling an invoice does not delete or negate transactions.  You do this simply to release transactions for another invoice.

REVUE GATEIO CANADA

When rendering (drawing or writing) an invoice, if the transactions for an object (such as a shipment) add up to zero, the object does not appear on the invoice.  This is important: if you want to remove a shipment from an invoice, just make sure the transactions on that invoice for that shipment sum to zero.

This means if you refund a shipment, negative transactions will be created such that they all add up to zero.  If the positive transactions were already posted to an invoice, it leaves the negative transactions for the next invoice which will appear as credits.

If, however, you cancel the invoice with the positive transactions then the next invoice will include those positive transactions bringing the price to zero, hiding the shipment.

GATEIO NON, JE NE PEUX PAS ACHETER

This is discussed further here.  Essentially this is a technique to limit which transactions (the selected ones) go on an invoice.  It is a tool to separate transactions for some reason.  Sometimes you need to get rid of transactions so selecting them and filing a Reference Invoice gets the job done.

TRANSFÉRER DES PIÈCES VERS L'ÉCHANGE GATE IO

This is a special case.  Customers can be set to “Carry Forward” mode or “Credit” mode.  Credit mode means that if the sum of all transactions on an invoice is negative, the invoice becomes a Credit Note.

Carry Forward mode prevent Credit Notes from being created by creating a positive transaction on the invoice to make the total zero, and an equal negative transaction that will go back into the billing queue for future invoices.  You would use this mode if you want to carry a running balance for a customer.  For example, the customer pays $100 in advance making their first invoice (if there are no shipments) -$100.  Carry Forward makes this invoice $0 and puts a -$100 transaction back into the queue for the next invoice.

PORTE JE SAISAMA

Transactions go on Invoices.  This procedure is called “Posting”.  Cancelling an Invoice releases those transactions.

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.

Invoicing can be seen as complex and sometimes awkward but understanding the process will certainly help. Operators often expect invoices to be “editable” in as much as one can put anything on them or make arbitrary changes. In fact the invoice is simply a collection of transactions.

Transactions are generated during various operations in the system, most often when reconciling carrier invoices. Each shipment typically has many transactions which add up (for each category) to the total chargeable amount. Each transaction can either be un-assigned or assigned to a single invoice. The invoicing system automatically combines transactions for a shipment so that no shipment appears twice on a single invoice. However, a shipment can appear on multiple invoices.

If, for example, you edit the price of a shipment that has already been invoiced then the un-assigned transactions generated by the system (after editing) will represent the difference from the previous total bill. Imagine a shipment that has been invoiced for $50 but you change the price to $40. Internally an un-assigned -$10 transaction has been created. If you preview a new invoice for that customer it will contain this -$10 credit. However, if you cancel the original invoice (unassigning the previous transactions) the new preview will contain simply the updated $40 charge.