Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

3–55. Create Different Supplier Accounts for Different Terms

Suppliers occasionally require different payment terms for different products or services. For example, one product must be paid for within 30 days, while another can be paid for sooner in exchange for an early payment discount. If so, the accounts payable staff will have a hard time differentiating between the different terms, resulting in errors that require yet more work to correct.

A possible solution is to create different computer master files for each set of terms. By doing so, supplier invoices can be assigned to the appropriate supplier account, resulting in accurate payment processing. However, this best practice still requires knowing to which account a supplier invoice should be assigned. This problem can be resolved by forcing the issue back to the supplier and having it enter the correct supplier code on all submitted invoices, depending upon the type of transaction submitted.

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