To refund your customers
Under normal circumstances it is an exception that you have to refund your customer. Oracle Receivables has no standard functionality to refund customers in an easy (electronically) way. The work around mostly advised is to enter your customer also in Oracle Payables, enter the amount that has to be paid as an invoice in Oracle Payables and then pay the invoice(s) via the regular payment process in Oracle Payables. Next you still have to close the outstanding invoice amount in Oracle Receivables. It is clear that when there are only a few of these cases a month, this way of refunding customers is acceptable. When there is a need to refund for example 100 or more customers every month another solution must be found. APRO has developed APRO Refund as standard solution for this problem and APRO Refund is already used by many customers.
APRO Refund
APRO Refund is a separate module on top of the APRO Banking Gateway. The APRO Refund module contains two main functionalities. Refund customer transactions for refunding transaction types (for example credit memos). Refund Receipt Write off's for refunding all kinds of amounts that are posted via a Receipt Write-off on a special receivable activity.
Refund customer transactions
Imagine a company that attracts new customers by a special promotional campaign. New customers can become a member and will have to pay 30 Euro (in advance) for the first three months, after that they pay 15 Euro per month (commonly collected by Direct Debit). When at the end of the first three months the customer decides to cancel his or her membership the 30 Euro will be refunded. The company gets 5000 new customers every month and 30 % of those new customers decide to end their membership at the end of month three.
In this example 1500 customers will have to be refunded every month. Normally this kind of companies have special subsystems that will generate invoices for the monthly membership and will also generate the credit memo's for the refund of the 30 Euro. When the subsystem sends the credit memo's via a special transaction type to Oracle Receivables, APRO Banking Gateway can select those credit memo's and it can create a payment file for the bank with the 1500 payment orders. It will also automatically create a transmission in the standard Oracle Receivable Lockbox in which all the paid invoices will be reconciled. This way what could take days (refunding 1500 customers) can be done in 15 minutes.
Below you can see the screen of the APRO Banking Gateway where a selection of the invoices that have to be refunded is made.
Authorized users can deselect specific invoices and when only the invoices that must be paid are selected, the payment file can be created and the details of the paid customer invoices can be transferred to the Lockbox interface.
Refund Receipt Write-off's
During the normal work of the Receivables department, it happens that invoices are paid twice or invoices are over paid. When those amounts have to be refunded, the APRO Refund module offers a solution. It can refund those amounts at a regular basis of for example once a week.
The process is simple. A special receivable activity is created. With a receipt write-off all the amounts that have been paid by customers but must be refunded are posted on that special receivable activity (for example Refund to customer). Because using receipt write-off's must be authorized in Oracle Receivables, you can also assign a person who approves all the receipt write-off's that are created this way. This way you assure that at least two persons have seen the receipt write-off before it can be selected by APRO Refund.
At the end of the week somebody, who is authorized for that option, will fetch the new approved receipt write off's that are waiting to be paid.
When the selection is definitive, the user can create a payment file that can be sent to the bank. More then 250 different payment formats are supported.