Contra Balances

Offset customer and vendor balances using contra processes and postings.

Bevica’s contra processing feature streamlines financial management for organisations that act as both customer and supplier by automatically netting off payables and receivables linked to the same trading partner. It identifies offsetting balances, calculates the net position, and posts only the resulting payment or receipt—removing the need for manual spreadsheet calculations. The process maintains a full audit trail, supports review and approval before posting, and reduces unnecessary cash movements while preserving complete visibility of all underlying customer and vendor transactions.

Prerequisites

Customer has been created and set up.

Linking Customers to an existing Vendor

To link a Vendor to a Customer account:

1

Step 1

Choose the search icon, enter Customers, and then choose the related link.

2

Step 2

Open the required Customer Card and navigate to the Contra Balances fasttab.

3

Step 3

Populate the Contra Vendor No. field with the Vendor No. This automatically populates the corresponding field on the Vendor Card with the current Customer No.

Vendors already linked to a Customer No. will not appear in the dropdown list.

Linking Customers to a new Vendor

This feature requires the Customer to be linked to a CRM Contact.

The routine can be accessed from either the Customer card or Broking Worksheet pages.

1

Step 1

Navigate to Customers or Broking Worksheet.

2

Step 2

On the Customer Card go to Actions, Functions, Create & Link Vendor. OR On the Broking Worksheet, Actions, Create & Link Vendor.

3

Step 3

This will ask you to select a Vendor Template that then creates the Vendor, linking it to both the Customer Contact and the Contra Vendor No. field on the Customer card.

The process will error if the customer is already linked to a Vendor via CRM Contacts. If this is the case you will need to populate the Contra Vendor No. field manually on the Customer Card.

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Suggest Contra Payments

Bevica can automatically propose a contra journal that nets the two balances against each other. This avoids manual reconciliation and reduces unnecessary cash movement.

The system uses the linked Customer/Vendor records together with the Offset to Customer setting on the Vendor card—configured as No Contra, Partial Contra, or Full Contra.

Vendor Card

1

Step 1

Choose the search icon, enter Vendor.

2

Step 2

Open the required Vendor Card and navigate to the Contra Balances fasttab.

3

Step 3

Populate the Offset To Customer field and populate it with the required option.

The Offset to Customer field determines how the Suggest Contra Payments routine creates payment journal lines to move balances from the vendor to customer.

• No Contra: no contra entries are suggested by the system. Any contra postings must be created manually.
• Partial Contra: if the customer balance is greater than the vendor balance, the contra entry will be for the vendor balance. If the customer balance is less than the vendor balance, the contra entry will be for the customer balance.

  For example:

  Customer balance of 2,000, vendor balance of 1,500: contra entry will be 1,500.

  Customer balance of 2,500, vendor balance of 3,000: contra entry will be 2,500.
• Full Contra: generates contra entries for the full vendor balance.

  For example:

  Customer balance of 2,000, vendor balance of 1,500: contra entry will be 1,500.

  Customer balance of 2,500, vendor balance of 3,000: contra entry will be 3,000.

The Vendor and Customer accounts must have the same currency to set the Offset to Customer field.

Suggest Contra Payments routine

1

Step 1

Choose the search icon, enter Payment Journals, and then choose the related link.

2

Step 2

If you would like to have contra payments processed in their own batch, create a new CONTRA journal batch.

3

Step 3

After selecting the required Batch, on the page ribbon select Prepare, Suggest Contra Payments. The Options section gives you the ability to modify the routine's behaviour.

Option	Note
Last Payment Date	The routine selects Vendor and Customer Ledger Entries with a Due Date up to and including this date. This field defaults to today's date and is a mandatory field.
Posting Date	Set the Posting Date to be applied to journal lines. This field defaults to today's date and is a mandatory field.
Starting Document No.	Set the starting document number for the journal lines. This is a mandatory field.
New Doc. No. per Line	New Doc. No. per Line
Apply Customer Entries	Set this to automatically apply customer entries.
Apply Vendor Entries	Set this to automatically apply vendor entries.

The routine can also be filtered to determine which Vendors are included.

On clicking OK, multiple journal lines are created given the Vendor card and routine set up.

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Viewing Contra Balances

The balance amount fields listed below are available from the Customer Card, Contra Balances fasttab, and List pages:

• Vendor Balance
• Vendor Balance (LCY)
• Vendor Balance Due
• Vendor Balance Due (LCY)

Additional fields are available on the Customer Statistics page.

The balance amount fields listed below are available from the Vendor Card, Contra Balances fasttab, and List pages:

• Customer Balance
• Customer Balance (LCY)
• Customer Balance Due
• Customer Balance Due (LCY)

Additional fields are available on the Vendor Statistics page.

On either the Customer or Vendor List pages you can add Balance and Contra Balance fields, export the list to Excel to be able to calculate a net position.