Accounting Best PracticesFifth Edition_6

"Đối với một hướng dẫn toàn diện, dễ đọc để sửa chữa những thiếu sót tất cả các quá phổ biến trong bộ phận kế toán của bạn, không nhìn xa hơn so với cuốn sách tuyệt vời này Steve Bragg cung cấp hàng trăm các bản sửa lỗi, nhiều người trong số họ đòi hỏi thời gian đáng ngạc nhiên rất ít hoặc chi phí. trong khi cung cấp một hướng dẫn hữu ích để thực hiện những cạm bẫy phổ biến ... ...
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Accounting Best PracticesFifth Edition_6ch07_4773.qxd 12/29/06 9:16 AM Page 152 152 Credit and Collections Best Practices By reducing the number of customers who take discounts, a company can make more selective use of this tool. There are three problems with using an early payment discount. One is the cost. To entice a customer into an early payment, the discount rate must be fairly high. A common discount rate is 2 percent, which translates into a significant expense if used by all customers. Another problem is that it is somewhat more dif- ficult to apply cash against accounts receivable if a discount is taken. Depending on the facility of the accounting software, an accounting clerk may have to go to the extreme of manually calculating the discount amount taken and charging off the difference to a special discounts account. Finally, a discount can be abused. If a customer is already stretching its payments, it may take the discount rate without shrinking its payment interval to the prescribed number of days. This can lead to endless arguments over whether the discount should have been taken, which the customer will win if it makes up a large enough percentage of a company’s sales. Granting early payment discounts can significantly reduce the amount of a company’s overdue accounts receivable, but this is at the high cost of the discount, which can be abused by some customers. Accordingly, this best practice should be used with care to improve the payment performance of selected customers. Cost: Installation time: 7–7 Conduct Immediate Review of Unapplied Cash It is a common occurrence for a collections person to call a customer about an overdue invoice, only to be told that the check was already sent. Upon further investigation, the collections staff finds that, for a variety of reasons, the errant check has been sitting in an accounting clerk’s ‘‘in” box for several weeks, waiting to be applied to an invoice in the accounts receivable aging. Common reasons for not performing this cash application include not having enough time, not under- standing what the check is intended to pay, or because there are unexplained line items on a payment, such as credits, that require further investigation before the check can be applied. None of the reasons for not applying cash are valid, given the consequences of wasting the time of the collections staff. Only two solutions need to be installed to ensure that cash is applied at once. First, cash application is always the highest priority of whomever is responsible for it, thereby avoiding all arguments regard- ing other items taking priority, or not having enough time to complete the task. Second, all cash must be applied, even if it is only to an ‘‘unapplied cash” cate- gory in the accounts receivable register for those items that cannot be traced immediately to an open invoice. In these cases, simply having the total of unap- plied cash for a customer clearly shown in the aged accounts receivable listing is a clear sign that the customer is correct—it has paid for an invoice and now thech07_4773.qxd 12/29/06 9:16 AM Page 153 7–8 Outsource Collections 153 collections person knows how to apply the cash that was already received. Apply- ing cash to accounts receivable as soon as it is received is critical to ensuring that the collections staff has complete information about customer payments before calling a customer. Ensuring that cash is applied on time is a key internal auditing task. Without periodic review by a designated auditor, the person in charge of cash applications may become lazy and delay some application work. To avoid this problem, audits must be regularly scheduled and should verify not only that all cash is applied in a timely manner, but that the amount of cash received each day matches the amount applied. If these controls are rigidly followed, it becomes an easy matter to enforce this most fundamental of best practices. Cost: Installation time: 7–8 Outsource Collections Some companies have a very difficult time creating an effective collections depart- ment. Perhaps the management of the function is poor, or the staff is not well trained, or it does not have sufficient swa ...