Something that is very different than most other ERP systems is Acumatica pre-release functionality in accounts payable. In other systems, before you can pay any bill, you have to decide what account you want to expense this too and you have to release it. This creates the journal entry in the general ledger. The challenge is that sometimes an AP clerk doesn’t know which account to choose, and this will stop the process. With this pre-release reclassification functionality, it can be processed, but the accountant or whoever is ultimately in charge of making sure our bills get posted to the right GL accounts will have a visual indicator that this AP bill account coding was in question and it can be reclassified.
Watch the video: Quick Look at Acumatica Pre-Release Functionality in Accounts Payable
Video Transcription:
“So we are going to move on to payables now, and we’re going to navigate over to the “Bills and Adjustment” generic inquiry. And one thing I want to draw your attention to are those rows highlighted in green. So we’re utilizing that conditional formatting that Shawn talked about earlier, where we’re trying to draw attention to any builder adjustments that are still open, that still need to be paid. So this is just another example of how we can use conditional formatting here over in our “Bills and Adjustment” generic inquiry, all of the user personalization that Shawn talks about in the opportunity, can be applied here on this inquiry, as well as anywhere else in the system. So meaning you can do your filtering, you can do move your columns, drag, and drop your columns. You can use your column chooser to either add or remove columns. So I just wanted to point out that that functionality he showed you, that carries forward into all the other modules so that you can personalize any form that you’re working with on a regular basis.
So we are going to jump in and we are going to create an AP bill, and we’re going to use our go-to vendor, AA Vendor. And we’re going to key in a bill here for $1000. Now, one thing I want you to notice is that GL account 50,000, that’s pulling in automatically. That’s coming from the vendor profile. We have the default expense account, in this case, it’s a COGS account that’s to be used whenever we try to transact on this vendor. So Shawn, if you can just save this and take this off hold.
One thing I want to point out that I feel is very, very different here than most other systems, is that Acumatica has this pre-release functionality. So typically before you can pay any bill, you have to decide what account you want to expense this too and you have to release it, which creates the journal entry in the general ledger, and then now this bill is open for you to make payment on.
Well, sometimes the challenge that some of our AP clerks has is they either don’t know what GL account this particular bill needs to get booked to, or maybe they’re questioning which account it should be. So Acumatica has this function called pre-release, and even though I have that 50,000 account specified down in the document details when I use the pre-release functionality, it goes out to the vendor card. And Shawn, if you can open up that vendor card for a moment or that vendor profile for a moment. And go over to the GL accounts tab.
Here, you’re going to see down on the very bottom there’s what’s called a reclassification account. So anytime now, if we go back to that “Bills and Adjustments”, if I select pre-release, instead of using that 50,000 account, it’s actually going to go to that 8120 account, which is called reclassification expense.
So what does this mean to our users? This means to basically our accountant or whoever is really ultimately in charge of making sure our bills get posted to the right GL accounts, this is a visual indicator to them that this AP bill account coding was in question. So we use this pre-release reclassification functionality.
So this created a journal entry. Let’s go over to our financial details. It created a journal entry, and you’re going to see, instead of it using that 50,000 account, it actually booked it to the 8120. Now, when this bill is in pre-release mode, I can still pay it. So even though I’m not sure what expense account it gets booked to, I can actually still pay that bill. And this bill will just be sitting out there in this pre-release status until someone goes in and they either verify the coding that was used in the document details, or they change it and then they release. So that’s what we’re going to do next.
So if we go over to bills. Back to that bill in adjustment. And again, document details, it shows the 50,000 account, even though that’s not what it was originally posted to. So I’m opening this up and I’m saying, okay. Yep. I agree that the account that the clerk thought we should use, it is correct. So I’m going to go back up to my button where it says release, and I’m going to select that. This is going to create a second journal entry, which we can look at under the financial details tab. And here’s where you’re going to see it’s coming out of that 8120 account and it’s now getting booked to COGS. So because of this pre-release functionality, that bill didn’t have to get held up in the mix. The AP clerk was able to push it through, through the pre-release status. That’s an indicator someone needs to look at it. And I can still pay it if I need to. So I think that functionality is pretty cool.”
This is a snippet from a detailed Acumatica overview. Watch the full video – Acumatica Lunch and Learn Part 2 – Acumatica Financials.
If you want to see more features that stand out in Acumatica review the series of articles our senior ERP consultants have published that compare Acumatica vs Microsoft Dynamics GP.
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By CAL Business Solutions, Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner, www.calszone.com
