Spire’s Accounts Receivable View Explained

Have you ever opened the Accounts Receivable module details in Spire and wondered, “How am I going to sift through all these transactions and find what I’m looking for?” If you have, this is the blogpost for you! There are three buttons in the Accounts Receivable screen that allow you to manipulate how things appear. These are meant to help you see and understand the state of the transactions for the customer, and to easily find things. That said, on occasion, they can end up confusing the end user. The purpose of this document is to explain what’s happening. (This information also pertains to Accounts Payable but for simplicity of explanation, we’ll refer to Accounts Receivable only.)

The three buttons in question:

1. Expand All/Collapse All
2. Show: Open/Show: All Since Last Year (Fiscal)/Show: All
3. Show Credits

We’re going to use an example customer that has the following four items posted:

• 1 pre-Payment
• 2 Invoices
• 1 Credit memo

I’ve applied:

• The Payment to the first Invoice (0000620371)
• The Credit memo to the second Invoice (0000620372).

Results:

• See print screen below.
• When items are applied, the item with the highest remaining value is the one that shows as having a balance. I like to call this the ‘Top item’.
• Linking the Payment to the first Invoice (0000620371):
  • Because the Payment was for a higher amount than the Invoice, the Payment shows an outstanding balance of -1,189.25 (Payments and Credit memos with a balance will always show as negative).
• Linking the Credit memo to the second Invoice (0000620372):
  • Because the second Invoice was higher than the Credit memo, the Invoice shows an outstanding balance of 111.95.

You’ll see a grey arrow to the far left of each of these items now. Clicking that arrow expands that transaction so you can see everything applied to it.

In the print screen below, I’ve expanded the Payment. Anything that is indented below it is applied to it. In this example, you can see that the Payment still shows its balance and the applied Invoice shows a balance of zero.

Expand All

If you’d like to Expand all the applied items on screen at once, click the Expand All button.

The ‘Top’ item will always show the Balance. The child items (the ones indented below the Top item) will always show a balance of zero.

Show: Open/Show: All Since Last Year (Fiscal)/Show: All

When you open a customer’s Accounts Receivable screen, you’ll only see Open items by default (items with a balance). If you want to see all items, including those with a balance of zero, click the Show: Open button and make your selection. You can choose either Show: All Since Last Year (Fiscal) OR Show: All. If you have a lot of history and want to speed things up on this screen, choose the first option. But if you want to see absolutely everything, click Show: All.

In the example, you can get some strange looking results when you click either of the Show: All buttons as in the screen shot below:

Now you can see all the Invoices ever posted (assuming you chose Show: All) PLUS any Payments or Credits that have an outstanding balance. This is probably the most important point to understand to make sense of what you’re seeing. Invoices PLUS outstanding Payments or Credits.

If I now click Expand All, I see duplicates of some items because of the view I’ve chosen as per the screen shot below:

The red Invoice shows twice. The yellow Payment shows twice. Here’s why…

The top Invoice highlighted in red must show the Payment when you expand it because that Payment was applied to that Invoice.

The second copy of that Invoice, highlighted in red, shows because the Payment has been expanded and that Invoice was applied to that Payment. You can see the amount that was applied in purple.

If your customer’s account is quite simple with Invoices linked to Payments (with no outstanding balances on those Payments), this screen will look nice and clean. It’s only when you introduce Credit Memos or Payments with balances that things look a little weird.

The nice thing about this view is that you can sort by Reference No and then start typing a Reference No in order to jump down to that particular Invoice. Remember to enter the leading zeros!

Show Credits

The Show Credits button allows you to flip this view around so that you can easily search for a Cheque Number or EFT Number in the Reference No column. Clicking Show Credits changes my view to now look like this:

Now you can see all Payments or Credit Memos PLUS any Invoices with an outstanding balance. Sort by Reference No. and you can start typing a Cheque number or word, i.e. EFT to jump down to that Payment or Credit memo in the list.

Again, if you Expand All, or just expand a single Payment, you can see which Invoices were paid with that Payment.

You’ll see some duplication in this view as well but I hope, now that you understand what’s going on, it will all make sense.

If you want to switch back to the view that shows the Invoices as the ‘Top items’, click the ‘Show Credits’ button to turn it off.

Happy collections!

More useful tips can be found in our other blogposts here.