Ever Change Your A/R Aging?

GP does make it easy to go into the A/R setup and change both the aging basis (document date or due date) and the aging buckets (perhaps you want to go to 15 day buckets instead of 30 day buckets).  After changing the bucket titles and definitions, you just run the aging routine and you have new aging.  Pretty simple stuff!

Almost.

Turns out you have a couple additional considerations.  If you added a sixth (or sixth and seventh) aging bucket, you need to modify your standard receivables trial balance in order to include those columns.  Not just one report, but every one of those report versions (detail and summary, aged, aged with options and historical) need to be addressed (or ignored at the peril of some user running that version some day and not having complete information).

You also have to consider your smartlists.  If you are using an “out of the box” smartlist (with the asterisk at the end) where you have not overridden the column “display name” for the aging buckets, the titles will have changed for you automatically.  Cool!  But if you saved a favorite, changed the display names of the aging columns or used Smartlist Designer or Builder to create a modified version of the smartlist query, the title DO NOT CHANGE.

We’ve found you have two choices.  One option is to go in and manually change the display name for these columns.  Turns out this is the simple way.  Your other choice is to delete the columns from the smartlist and then re-add them, so they default to the right display name.  If you go this route, you have one more requirement.  After deleting the columns and before adding them back, you actually need to exit smartlist or else the new, correct column names will not appear in your “add column” selection.

 

About the Author

Al Schuette
Senior ERP Consultant
Al brings his experience as a computer programmer, information technology manager, business consultant, and entrepreneur/business owner to his clients. He has been active in the manufacturing sector throughout his career and holds an APICS certification in integrated resources management.  He has worked extensively with a variety of wholesale distributors and enjoys helping clients implement improvements in their supply chain and inventory management.  Al has extensive expertise in assisting organizations that currently are, or wish to, utilize job Project Accounting within Microsoft Dynamics GP.