How to find overdue invoices and quiet accounts

Overdue invoices are money you have earned and not collected. Quiet accounts are money you were earning and have stopped. Both are part of What is wholesale?: the first lives on Wholesale › Invoices, the second on Wholesale › Accounts.

The second is easier to miss, because nothing appears anywhere to tell you.

How do you find overdue invoices?

Open Wholesale › Invoices and press Overdue. It lists every issued invoice with money still owing that is at least one day past its due date, oldest due date first.

The columns are Invoice, Account, Order, Issued, Due, Status, Aging, Total, Paid and Balance. The Aging chip says how late each one is: 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days or 60+ days.

The page opens on Outstanding, which is every issued invoice with a balance, including those not yet due. Paid lists the ones settled in full. The Wholesale › Invoices row appears once the Invoices module is on in Settings › Modules.

Who do you chase, and how?

The account's accounts-payable contact rather than the buyer. The person who placed the order is rarely the person who pays it, and a chase sent to the wrong one adds a week.

The AP contact email is on the account's page, in the Buyer & rep card: open the account from Wholesale › Accounts. Then click the invoice and press Send to buyer, which emails the PDF and CSV to that address again, so they have the bill in front of them when you call.

When the money arrives, record it on the invoice. See How to invoice a wholesale order and record payment.

What should you check before you chase?

Two things that look like late payers and are not.

Goods shipped and never billed. On Wholesale › Orders, an order whose Fulfilment reads Shipped or Partly shipped and whose Aging reads Not invoiced has gone out with no invoice behind it. Raise one from the order before chasing anyone else.

No terms agreed. An invoice issued to an account with no payment terms has no due date, so it never appears under Overdue. Add terms to the account, then, while no payment is recorded, void the invoice and raise a new one from the order. See How to add an account and set payment terms.

How do you find accounts that have gone quiet?

Open Wholesale › Accounts and press Gone quiet, which lists accounts with no order in the last 60 days. Never ordered beside it lists accounts that have never placed one.

Gone quiet puts the account that has been silent longest at the top, so it is already in the order you should work it. The columns are Name, Buyer, Rep, Terms and Last ordered.

Your workspace may use its own word for accounts; Settings › Terminology shows both.

Why does this list matter?

Because a quiet account shows up nowhere else in Tideswell. It has no open order, so it is not on the order book, and it owes nothing, so it is not on Overdue.

A pro shop that ordered every season for three years and has not ordered in two months has usually not decided to stop. They have changed buyer, or their rep left, or nobody called. Sixty days is early enough that a phone call still works.

Never ordered is the other half: accounts somebody set up and never followed through on. Those are cheap to chase because the relationship already exists on paper.

How do you act on one?

Open the account and look at Rep. A dash means the account belongs to nobody, which is often why it went quiet; press Edit and give it a rep while you are there.

Then hand somebody the call. Raise an outreach from Create new (+) › Outreach with the buyer's name, number and the reason, and it stays on Customers › Outreach until someone finishes it. See How to log and work through outreach.

If the call changes anything, such as new terms or a smaller opening order, press Record a decision on the account page so the next person knows why. See What are decisions and track records?.

What routine is worth keeping?

Monthly, both lists in one sitting.

Work Overdue oldest first, then Gone quiet from the top. One recovers money you have already earned, and the other recovers customers you already had, which are the two cheapest kinds of revenue there are.