Remittance advices - where should suppliers inv #s appear?

[confused.com]

All of our customers who use other accounting software packages can include our invoive number on their remittance advices, most do it automatically and when two or more customers use the same package the inv # always appears in the same place for each customer. With sage users however this is not the case, when the remittance advice does include our sales invoice number it is in different places for different customers or alternatively, the customer says sage can't do that. Please could somebody shine some light on this area of confusion, I cannot see why this accounting software package should be made to look so heath robinson, unless that is the users of sage have got something wrong, or am I just expecting too much from a cheap package?

The latest mess we have had to reconcile has 4 or more invoice numbers all shown separated by slashes in the reference column. (3 shown and the forth truncated and 5+ do not show).




Can somebody help me on this?

[brucedenney]

Sage is not a rigid inflexible system it is a very flexible package and so is totally customisable, remittance advices can include invoice numbers and most do, some users choose not to record supplier invoice numbers in their package, a common option is to record the purchase order number instead. There are several different formats available dependant on the version of Sage and the upgrading of reports.

This forum can help any of your customer using Sage who wish to add invoice numbers to their remittance advices, assuming they are recording supplier invoice numbers.

In my accounts I do not bother recording invoice numbers, they are long tedious to enter and they provide no benefit to me, my suppliers can establish which invoice is being paid from the date of the invoice, and the invoice amount paid.

You say in the "latest mess" you have 4 invoice numbers in one column. This suggest that your customer has entered 4 invoices as one item in Sage rather than as 4 separate invoices. This could be construed as an operation error. If you sent 4 invoices and they chose to save time and money by entering them as one invoice with 4 numbers in the ref column there is nothing any software package can do to prevent this.

[confused.com]

Thank you for your response which, in conjunction with other input and data gathered, has allowed me a tolerable understanding of the situation.

One final non consequetor though, I would reason that system flexibility within a package should rise in correlation with the skill of the users. This package seems to be most useful to smaller businesses, lower financially skilled people and lower demand applications. It therefore seems odd that sage contravenes that correlation by placing increased flexibility in the hands of people with lower knowledge levels and that appears to me to be dangerous.

No disrespect to the package meant and please understand that I am a scientist and not an accountant.

Just my 2p. Thank you.

[brucedenney]

Flexibility is a "COMMERCIAL FEATURE" it enables Sage to sell more product.

It also provides opportunities for skilled people who support those less skilled to provide users with things that are tailored to the way they want them to be, this provides a commercial opportunity that results in people investing time in developing skills and providing support to user sand so one.

Diversity is our strength, mono-cultures of conformity is a bad thing, common interfaces and protocols are a good thing. If you want consistency of data then the way to do this is to use EDI there are many suppliers of such systems, Sage 50 has a built in feature that allows users of Sage 50 with Microsoft Outlook to do EDI using the BASDA E-Biz XML format (typically via email).