Manage customer debt

You can choose how Sage 200 Accounts helps you identify and control your customer debt.

The payment terms and ageing periods you set on the customer account record help you analyse your customer debt.

The Credit Control Enquiry provides an instant up date view of those customers with outstanding debts and a list of their outstanding transactions. You can sort and filter the information to help you to pinpoint those customers that you need to target further in order to collect your money.

The Aged Debtors and Due Date reports provide a view of the trends in your customer payments.

There are three stages to managing customer debt:

• Set up credit controls.

  These are the settings that control how you report and handle your outstanding transactions.

  • Set up your ageing periods on the Sales Ledger settings Ageing tab.

    You can specify a minimum of three and a maximum of eight ageing periods. The ageing periods are used on to show transactions on your aged debt reports and statements.

  • Set up default payment terms on the Sales Ledger settings Ageing tab.

    This determines when your invoices are due to be paid. These terms are applied to all new customer accounts by default. You can change the payment terms for individual customer accounts, using the sales account Payment tab, if required.

  • Set up a credit limit for each of your customers on the sales account Company tab.

    You receive a warning when a customer's account goes above the credit limit.

  • Set up finance charges on the Sales Ledger settings Processing tab.

    You can choose to charge interest on overdue invoices. These interest charges show on your reports and statements. You must specify the percentage interest you want to charge.

• Use the Credit Control Enquiry and produce credit control reports to see the outstanding debts for each of your customers.
• Handle customer debt.

  • Produce paper or electronic statements for customers.
  • Produce debt chasing letters to send to customers based on the age of their outstanding debt.
  • Generate finance charges.

  You can choose to add a finance charge to outstanding invoices. The amount owed increases as they do not pay.

  • Put a customer account on hold to prevent further transactions being processed.
  • Write off bad debt, and reclaim the VAT, for those customers you know will never pay you.