Customer Status

Accounts can be assigned one of five different status codes: Active, Inactive, Hold, Disabled, and Closed. An account's status affects how and if the application handles the statement and finances in various areas. Here's a chart explaining how each status affects various areas and functions:

*Accounts that are on "Hold" do allow limited use in Point of Sale as long as the payment method or transaction doesn't affect the customer's available credit or balances. Orders do not allow final processing because order balances are considered when determining available credit. An error task list item is produced in this case.

Sales, orders, quotes, tickets, direct ship, and charge returns all produce a message box warning at the time of customer selection. This is done to notify the user immediately that the customer or job is on Hold. A user can continue past the message; however, task list errors may still prevent processing (as is the case with customer orders).

Payments and Payouts do not produce any messages, errors, or warnings regarding "Hold" accounts. Payments and returns are allowed for "Hold" accounts.

**If a "Closed" account has balances, a statement document is created but is excluded from standard delivery processing by the Statements form. The account status won't prevent printing or email/fax processing manually from Documents.

Active vs. Inactive

The Active and Inactive status relate to the activity level of the customer. If a customer has no sales activity for an extended period of time, the account is automatically changed to the "Inactive" status. There is a system parameter for "Inactivity Months" (on the Receivables tab). This determines the length of time that an account must go without sales activity before its status is automatically changed (to "Inactive").

If an inactive account has sales activity, it will be changed back to "Active" automatically. Orders and quotes are not considered sales activity. The status is only updated when a sale is processed.

Statements

Active, Inactive, Hold, and Disabled statuses do generate statement documents if the customer has a non-zero balance (including a credit balance) or if the account has had any current cycle activity. This is done regardless of the account's "print zero statement" setting.

The print setting affects whether the statement document is flagged for printing (or other delivery methods such as fax or email) and does not determine whether a document is generated. If the customer's balance is zero and the customer is set to not print zero statements, the document is created but also flagged so that it does not print.

Closed Status: Aging and Statements

An account with a "Closed" status will only generate a statement document if the balance is not zero or if there's any current cycle activity. Statement documents for "Closed" accounts are always flagged to "skip" printing.

Accounts with current cycle activity should not be marked closed. Billing cycle processing (a monthly task that creates statement documents) ages accounts. Closed accounts are considered "frozen" and are not aged for this reason. Closing an account during the same cycle in which account activity occurred will cause that customer's balances (aging) and statement document (if any) to be incorrect. This can cause problems with Trial Balance reporting as well.

It's best to initially make a customer's account disabled until the next billing period begins before updating a customer's status to Closed.

Reporting Tip

Numeric status codes are maintained in the SQL database under the table dbo.CustomerMaster. The column name is "CustomerStatus" and is an integer type. The numeric codes are listed in parentheses next to each status type below:

•Active (0)

•Inactive (1)

•Hold (2)

•Disabled (3)

•Closed (4)