BILL CUSTOMER. The shipment of goods marks the completion of the economic event and the point at which the customer should be billed. Billing before shipment encourages inaccurate record keeping and inefficient operations. When the customer order is originally prepared, some details such as inventory availability, prices, and shipping charges may not be known with certainty. In the case of back-orders, for example, suppliers do not typically bill customers for out-of-stock items. Billing for goods not shipped causes confusion, damages relations with customers, and requires additional work to make adjustments to the accounting records.
To prevent such problems, the billing function awaits notification from shipping before it bills. Figure 4-1 shows that upon credit approval, the bill-customer function receives the sales order (invoice copy) from the receive order task. This document is placed in an S.O. pending file until receipt of the shipping notice, which describes the products that were actually shipped to the customer. Upon arrival, the items shipped are reconciled with those ordered and unit prices, taxes, and freight charges are added to the invoice copy of the sales order. The completed sales invoice is the customer’s bill, which formally depicts the charges to the customer. In addition, the billing function performs the following record keeping–related tasks:
• Records the sale in the sales journal.
• Forwards the ledger copy of the sales order to the update accounts receivable task.
• Sends the stock release document to the update inventory records task.
The sales journal is a special journal used for recording completed sales transactions. The details of sales invoices are entered in the journal individually. At the end of the period, these entries are summarized into a sales journal voucher, which is sent to the general ledger task for posting to the following accounts: