How to manage credit risks with account customers.
Mandalay CS is not a finance system like MYOB or Xero, and is only designed as a point of sale (POS) it relies on other systems to manage invoices and payments towards debtor accounts. A fiance extract is performed out of the Mandalay system and imported directly into the finance system where an invoice is generated. Any payments towards that invoice are processed within the finance system. Only the finance system is aware of an account credit status.
There are some options within the Mandalay facility system to assist with managing the risk of bad debtor accounts and this article covers how best to use these options.
Client Credit Stop
When a finance system is informed of the recent sales for an account customers, a calculation of the account credit status will be performed. If the customer ends up over their limit the account can be places on credit stop within the Mandalay CS system. This will force any transactions recorded against the clients records to be made using EFTPOS or Cash payment methods.
The credit stop option can be found in the account client record in the Administration module. Along with the credit stop flag an additional message can be provided that is presented the operator when the client record is used in a transaction.
When the operator selects the clients record in Ticketing they are presented with the following message and are then forced to use the cash tendering screen to complete the transaction.
This feature relies on the finance system knowing when a customer is over its limit which means this can only occur when an invoice is generated from sales generated in the the facility system. If this only occurs once a month then its is possible for a debtor to exceed their limit without knowledge. Increasing the integration frequency can help with this and allow for better detection. A daily integration with the finance system can ensure that the credit status is updated daily. However there is still the risk a customer could exceed the limit in a day. For those customer that could be at risk of this its possible to use another feature to protect against over spend (See below).
Monthly Sales Limit
The best that Mandalay CS can provide in the way of direct credit control is through setting a monthly sales limit. This is the total amount that can be placed on an account each month. When a transaction is captured in Ticketing against a client with a sales limit, the system will check the total sales for the current calendar month against the limit and report to the operator if the client has gone over their limit.
The sales limit is set against the client record.
The operators is presented with this message when the client has exceeded their month spend limit.
Note: This message is just a warning and transactions can be completed. A business process is required to change the client record to credit stop.
This method does have some limitations when there are multiple sites setup to use Mandalay CS. Each site only has access to the transactions relevant to its site, so when Ticketing checks the sales to date for the month it can only see the local sites transactions history.
There are options to help with this situation and requires an over night process to check transactions on the central database for clients that have exceeded their spend limit and then set a warning. (Please contact Mandalay support if you require further details on this option)