Summary invoicing

The term 'summary invoicing' refers to a specific type of invoicing where individual delivery notes are collected on a summary sheet and posted to the general ledger. The primary reason for summary invoicing is always a situation where we have a number of delivery notes that we do not want to post individually to the general ledger or to the balance sheet.

1. Typical examples of summary invoicing

The most typical examples of summary invoicing are:

• Decadal or monthly invoicing (we invoice the customer or the supplier invoices us every 10/30 days),
• joint invoicing of several business units,
• successive deliveries.

The basic features of a summary edition document are defined in Document type code list - summary issue, for summary collection in Document type code list - summary collection. Examples can be found in Collected Edition or Collected Acquisition.

2. Process of summary invoicing

Let's look at summary invoicing using the example of joint invoicing of several business units. The lessons learned from this example can be easily generalised and applied to other cases.

Let's assume that we have Customer A, which has business units PE Ljubljana, PE Koper, PE Maribor. We deliver goods to the Buyer's business units, and for each delivery we issue a delivery note, which is signed by the Buyer's authorised representative to confirm receipt.

So we have delivery notes over a period of time:

The above example could be partially optimised by using a buyer/payer pair, but for the sake of clarity we will stick to this setting.

If we book the delivery notes directly, we will have the following entries in the balancing accounts (we have ignored the tax entries in the example!):

In addition to the excessive increase in bookings, it also makes it very difficult for us to check (it is not immediately obvious how much the customer owes us) and to do the work (e.g. closing the accounts).

Recognising the disadvantages of invoicing a large number of invoices with small amounts, we agree with the customer to invoice them once every 10 days. With each such (collection) invoice we capture all delivery notes for that customer.

When opening document types, we need to be careful to mark the documents we collect (e.g. delivery notes) as internal documents!

In the example above, such a decision results in the issue of two summary invoices:

which also immediately simplifies the bookings:

3. Aggregate invoicing of different types of documents

Aggregate invoicing is of particular importance for different types of documents.

The above example is extended by specifying that each of the customers is served by a passenger who also carries out outpatient sales.

For the sake of clarity and uniqueness, each passenger must provide his or her own running number.

The simplest way to ensure unique numbering throughout the organisation is to open a different type of document for each passenger.

A summary invoice that takes these types of documents into account ensures transparent accounting. Assume delivery notes as in the list below:

4. Aggregate invoicing of different types of documents

But life knows even more complicated cases. In the case of remittance (e.g. newspaper deliveries), we have to deduct the receipts of the returned goods from the total of the delivery notes issued and only invoice the net quantity received.

For each passenger in the example above, we open a new type of document - a credit note.

We extend the definition of a summary account to include newly opened credit notes.

More complex is the use of summary invoicing to track production at co-operators, where we need to take over internal issues with summary invoicing.

Summary invoicing of different types of documents (acceptance/issue) is possible from PANTHEON 4.5 onwards.