Friday Feature – Credit Where Credit Is Due

What happens when you overpay a vendor?  Do they just get to keep the money?  Probably not.  Probably, you either get a check for the amount or you apply a credit memo, a term used by many school business accountants for a “negative” payment, a way to deduct overpayments from future payments.
Escape Online makes creating credit memos very easy.  Really, as easy as creating a payment.

All you have to do is enter a negative amount in the Amount field of the payment, using a minus sign or placing the number in parentheses.  You can do this for any vendor requisition payment, at any time, even if the requisition has been completed.

When you process the credit memo, Escape Online will keep that “negative payment” in the approved status until there are enough positive payments to cover it.  For example, you have a vendor that you do business with all of the time (an outlet store), and you return some high ticket items.  Now you have a negative balance.  Then you buy some more items, but you still have a negative balance.

Escape Online keeps track of this for you until the balance returns to a positive state and then it cuts a check on your next check run.  Check out this LIVE example of a vendor with both negative and positive payments. (Click on the graphic to see the full report for the payment history of this check.)

See how the credit memo just kind of hangs out until it is all used up, giving credit where credit is due!

Note:  Credit memos only work for vendors that have the Combine Payments flag in the Vendor Address record set to YES.