How to Keep an On-Account Ledger for Your Customers

1What Gets Hard With a Paper Ledger?

In a paper ledger, each customer gets a page, sales and payments are written by hand and the balance is worked out again every time. If a line is skipped or a total comes out wrong, you end up disagreeing with the customer about the amount. To see who has not paid for how long, you have to leaf through every page.

Keeping an on-account ledger properly comes down to three rules: every sale is recorded under the customer's name, every payment comes off the balance, and late payments are noticed in time. The sections below follow these rules.

2Record On-Account Sales Under the Customer's Name

If the customer will pay later, complete the sale on account. In PratikKasa, when you choose On Account on the payment screen, you are asked to pick a customer; the sale amount is added to the customer's balance and the sale is written to the account history with its receipt.

• Add the customer once. A customer you add with a name and phone number is picked from the list on later sales.
• The items stay on record. The account history shows the receipt and items of every on-account sale; you can open the line and show it when you talk to the customer.
• You can also add a charge by hand. On Windows, you record a charge that did not go through the till with Add Charge; with 2.2.0 you can also do it on a phone from Add Transaction.

3Take the Payment, Reduce the Balance

When the customer comes to pay, record the amount on their account. In PratikKasa, you take it with Take Payment on the customer's row on Windows, or from the customer's page on a phone. On a phone, All of It enters the whole balance; for a partial payment you type the amount received and the balance left shows right away.

If a cashier is not allowed to see balances, they do not see the amounts; they still take the payment by entering the amount the customer gives. A payment on an account is not counted as a second sale in reports; it goes to the on-account ledger. The payment is also recorded on the shift of the person who takes it.

4Remind Customers About Late Payments in Time

The longer a balance stays open, the harder it is to ask for it. Send a reminder as soon as the payment is late, in a short message with the amount due and the date of the last purchase.

PratikKasa marks a customer with an open balance and no activity for 15 days as Time for a Reminder. On Windows, the Time for a Reminder filter of the On-Account Ledger lists these customers, and Remind on the row opens WhatsApp with the customer's number. The Needs Attention section of the Today screen also shows how many customers have overdue balances.

What comes with PratikKasa 2.2.0:

• Reminder interval. You choose 7, 15 or 30 days for each customer. On a phone, Remind also opens WhatsApp.
• Account statement and reminders by email. If your business and the customer have an email address on record, you send the account statement as a PDF and can switch reminders to automatic emails.
• Account limit. You set an upper limit for a customer; when you add a charge, you see whether the new balance goes over the limit.

The drawings in this post are based on the screens of PratikKasa 2.2.0; what comes only with 2.2.0 is marked in the text.