Accounts Receivable Process Flow

Setup

While setting up Accounts Receivable, you need to understand how your company and customers are structured, how payments are processed, and what your reporting needs are.

The setup will include defining customers, terms, finance charges, process levels, and default codes. These will assist you in processing payments, maintaining customer balances, and reporting.

Create Transactions

Creating transactions consists of manually entering invoices, debit memos, and credit memos that have not been interfaced from other Lawson applications or a non-Lawson system.

The system allows you to debit, credit, write-off, or change the transactions that have been manually entered or interfaced.

Cash Processing

Cash processing is the core of the Accounts Receivable application. It consists of entering the cash payments and then applying the payments to the open transactions. This can be done through manual processing, automatic application, or interfacing from lock boxes, non-Lawson programs, electronic funds transfer (EFT), or bill of exchange (BOE). How your business splits job responsibilities will dictate which forms will be used.

Maintaining these processes might include settling disputes, creating chargebacks for under payments, or reversing applications.

Credit Management

The management of credit can be accomplished by reviewing customer balances and running aging reports. Depending on the credit limits set up for each customer, a credit analyst might require a dunning letter (late notice) be sent to the customer for collection of unpaid balances.

The system can track transaction activity which allows you to report and analyze the data in a variety of ways. For example activity can be reported by day, period, or year to date.

The Big Picture

The big picture diagram illustrates Accounts Receivable's four main processes, breaks the processes down into sub-processes, and serves as a reminder of where you are in the user guide.