Questions Customer attribute

Tom, as you have already surmised, you assign which attributes to track for each customer at the customer class level.  Attribute values are tracked individually for each customer.  This means that each variation of attributes you want to assemble requires a unique customer class. 

The trick is to think both conservatively and creatively. You can keep the number of classes lower bu making some attributes optional and not always populate them. You can even use automation notifications or generic inquires with filters established to look for situations where unique combinations are required procedurally but not programatically. For example, build a filter into a GI that only lists customers where Attribute A is True but Attribute B is null.  However if Attribute B is True, then only show those customers where Attribute B is not null.

Hope this helps.

When a system uses a single container to manage multiple properties, you have to make decisions and sometimes tradeoffs. 

If you want to pursue customization, you can always add new controls to a new tab on the customer maintenance screen and exercise complete control over what fields are visible based upon measured criteria.

As we tell all our customers, it's just a matter of deciding which requirements are needs (have to haves) and which are desires (nice to haves).

Thanks Shawn - this is helpful.

Tom, we don't just serve up Acumatica for our customers, we use it internally as well. If you want to share how you are using Classes now compared to how you want to assign Attributes, I would be happy to do a little brainstorming with ya.

Shawn, I realized I neglected to reply - my apologies for lengthy delayed response.  The impetus for this inquiry is bank reporting.  We are margining A/R balances to justify line-of-credit borrowing but expectation is that we report A/R amounts net of advance and unbilled amounts.  I am looking for way to tie the amounts reported by customer in A/R with amounts we track in liability accounts of customer advances and unbilled.  The latter is allocated to liability accounts in the G/L but transactions are not tied to a customer.  They are however tied to a project allocation where a given customer can be tied to multiple projects.  My thought is to use this to tie the reporting.  Welcome any further thoughts.

So the unbilled amount is only sitting in a General Ledger account? Or the Project Accounting module knows the amount, but just can't break it down by customer?

Sorry, I'm still very weak in Acumatica's Project Accounting module.

For now, only in GL account, but hoping to turn on the project module as of next month.  Hoping this opens up reporting options.

Hey Tom,

Sorry for the delay in responding.

When I read your post from yesterday, everything looks to me like it is tied to projects:

Customer Advances – Assume they are tied to projects or clinical trials

Unbilled – Assume this relates to work-in-progress for time and expenses associated with a project

Customer AR – Acumatica restricts AR Invoices to a single project.

Since you’re your business seems to be project focused and the Project Module should be very helpful consolidating all your information.

One nice thing about Projects in Acumatica is that once enabled, every transaction must be associated with a project. To do this, the first project you define is you no-project project. I know it sounds redundant but it’s not. This is the project you use for all entries that truly do not relate to an internal or external project.

This means that when you record a customer advance, you can relate that transaction to a specific project. During the course of the project, you can either create either create an invoice when due or process an allocation rule and have it offset the customer advance balance.

Since all external projects are related to a specific customer, you can use the project ID to link to the relevant customer and from there pull everything into a single view (Customer Advance GL balances by project, Earned but Unbilled WIP, and any open AR associated with each project and grouped by customer)

Might take some work and may have to be done using multiple GI’s consolidated in Excel with Power Query but I’m sure you can get there.

…..at least I hope so because that’s the same we are heading internally.

Cheers!

Thanks again, Shawn.  I agree all transactions (including A/R invoices) will be allocated to a project once we turn on the project module.  The structure of our project codes includes a unique alpha identifier of the customer.  This can then be used as the key to drive the summary.  Not sure I'm visualizing the power query solution, but I'm sure many paths to the same result.