We are using lockbox but the main problem is that customers sometimes (often) don’t transmit the invoice number. When there is no invoice number, then the lockbox processing can’t determine the customer account by looking up the invoice, so then the receipt just doesn’t import at all and has to be done manually.
Accounting feels it would be a futile effort to try to get the customers to properly transmit the invoice number so that it comes through in the lockbox file (and/or transmit their customer ID) but thinks lockbox should still create the receipts even if there is no invoice number (but just not post them). I have tried to explain that when you are entering a cash receipt, the very first step is to enter the customer ID, so there is no way to create the record without that piece of information first, whether we use lockbox or not.
I am imagining we could write our own custom integration that could import the lockbox data and stage it in a UD table, and try to do some fuzzy matching on the customer name, before creating the group. But I am hoping there is some simpler solution here I am missing.
Well you need the customer ID or name at least.
Worst case scenario, if in the input file there is the account and the bank from which the payment has come, if you have this information in Epicor you could determine the customer ID and even without the invoice number this would be an “cash on account” record which would need to be matched later.
Me and my colleague did last year a customization in Epicor to import a few thousand cash receipts a day simulating the cash receipt standard functionality but we had the the customer ID in the import file.
So what we were doing: a windows with a button to import the txt file from the bank, load data into a grid and have a second button to process the data with a log file and a screen to show what is processing. It would create a cash receipt group for a specific account (you choose it from a dropdown) and then add payment, select invoices, fill out the amounts per invoices (including discounts) and click the apply button and if amount would not match any invoice put it “on account”. The customer was having a few thousand records of cash receipts per day (sending thousands of medical invoices per day = thousands of cash receipts per day) and we needed a visual record that it is doing something as 7000 records processing would be taking like 10 minutes when epicor looked “frozen” so we put something visual on screen to show it works and where is it with processing.