We are using Deductions Workbench to help manage the Accounts Receivable account for a large marketplace customer who routinely files claims to have their invoices credited for reported pricing or quantity discrepancies.
We have a dedicated resource who disputes these claims. However, the dispute process can take several weeks to a few months. Consequently, we use Deductions Workbench to keep the claims open, decreasing the amount open on the unpaid invoice, and moving the receivables to an open AR Claims account until the dispute process has ended.
This customer routinely sends us Zero Dollar Remittances where contractually-defined credits are settled against open invoices. There is not cash exchanged but the credits need to be applied to the invoices.
There are 2 possible ways of handling this:
1 - Create a new customer payments journal and create any deductions that may exist in the zero dollar remittance (there could be hundreds of these). With this option, you can copy-paste the deductions into the interface and the process of creating the journal is simplified.
2 - Go to the Customer Account and open the "Settlements" and attempt to just settle invoices against the open credit memos and deductions (from deductions workbench) against the open invoice. However, when we take this approach each deduction needs to be entered individually and this is so painfully slow that it is not feasible).
If we try to post the zero dollar customer payments journal, we get an error because the standard out-of-the-box implementation specifically prevents creating payment journals that add up to be zero.
The only option, I have been able to find at this point is to extend/customize posting of payment journals so the zero dollar payment restriction is not considered.
Has anyone done this with satisfactory results? Are there any pitfalls or "gotchas" you have found along the way?
