Sales Receivables Summary Observations

I've struggled for a long time trying to understand what is probably super easy for most of you in GP Land.  The receivables summary screen in GP obviously shows the total document amounts for the whole company (or based on your filter), along with the total unapplied document amounts for the same scope.  But why oh why do the totals never seem to match??  I mean, after all, if you add a payment and don't apply it to anything, well, that of course works - it just increases the "Cash Receipts" total for both.  And, then, say, you apply some of that payment to an invoice.  Well, that works too, it reduces the Cash Receipts open total and also reduces the Sales open total, so the balance is unchanged on the open side (and of course didn't change on the original amount side).  So why are they off?



Traditional wisdom for GP says to run check links early and often, and maybe reboot your SQL Server.  And if that doesn't help, then run Utilities - Sales - Reconcililation, because surely there's a document header that's off.  (As an aside, if you are still on GP 10 or lower and have any sizable data then you won't be able to run that last utility, as it will crash.  Once you engage MS support through your partner you will learn the fix is to upgrade GP, har har).

So, I did some testing in The World Online and did find out some interesting stuff.  First, the scenarios I described above are correct - all posted transactions should balance when displayed in the Receivables Summary.  There are two reasons I know of that the two totals might not balance.  One is the more obvious reconciliation issue that can be handled by running the routine (with GP 2010 ugrade if it crashes, or you could roll the stability dice and write your own custom reconciliation routine like we did).  The second may not be as obvious - I certainly never guessed it until I was testing a reconciliation routine and noticed the behavior.  If you have any unposted sales transaction batches that include apply information then these transactions will cause the open transaction amounts to be adjusted, without adjusting the original transaction totals.

I hope this helps someone, because I've been all over the place trying to get a handle on this for months!