No matter your industry or business processes, you will inevitably need to provide a customer with a refund. Perhaps they bought too much, they need to return a broken item, or maybe you’re giving them a bit of money back out of appreciation. You may choose to add a credit to their account that they can use later. But for a number of reasons, you may want or need to issue a check.
An often-overlooked built-in feature in Dynamics GP is Refund Checks, and it promises to streamline the normally tedious (if not difficult) process of refund checks.
First, let’s emphasize the manual process of paying a customer a credit via check with no automation from this feature. We’ll go step-by-step, and if you’re not new to Receivables in GP, this will be familiar:
That’s a lot of steps to achieve one simple result of crediting my client and sending them a check. Though this isn’t a difficult process, there’s got to be a better way, right?
Especially if you’re creating refund checks often, we recommend going this quicker route.
When you’re ready to create a refund check, you’re first going to create the credit for whatever customer who needs it. Then you’ll head to Sales > Transactions > Refund Checks.
A window will open, and then you’ll want to set the Select Checks Batch ID. We have an easy batch called REFUNDS, and that will also set your Checkbook ID.
We’ll keep “Specific Document” selected in the Credit Refund for field, and we’ll select the Customer we want to refund.
Next, as we go to Insert the credit, notice that the credit line is editable. So you are able to refund only a portion of total, if you want.
After selecting that line, you click OK, and you’ll see the Customer Name, Check Amount, and Debit Memo field are now filled in.
The last field you need is the Vendor, which is how you will pay out this check. If you know this customer also is a vendor, you can use the search in this column to find them. But if this customer is not also already a vendor, we have a handy Create Vendor button, which we’ll click to open a Vendor Maintenance window with all of the customer’s info already pulled into these fields for you!
By default, the Status of the vendor is “temporary,” meaning I can delete this vendor record once I complete this process, if I want to. You can change the status, too, if needed.
After we save this new vendor, that record will appear in the Vendor Name field.
Now we can go ahead and Process the refund check! A new Print Payables Checks window will open, where I have a REFUND batch set, the next check number set, the check date, and the total. And I can print it from here, as normal.
Way faster and easier, with much less bouncing around inside GP from this area to that area to get this task completed. And a bonus here is that if you have multiple customers you’re sending checks to, you can create all the refund checks at once for “all customers with a balance.”
Now, to use the Refund Checks process in GP, we need to do a little bit of setup beforehand to ensure that this window works in the way just demonstrated. Navigate to the Microsoft Dynamics GP dropdown in the top left of the screen, then go to Tools > Setup > Company > Customer/Vendor Setup. Here, under Default Suspense Account, you will pick your suspense account to use for this purpose.
There are also some defaults, like Payables Description Prefix, the Payables Next Doc Number, and the Receivables Description Prefix. You have the option in this window to “Auto-create Customers/Vendors” if you do want that step fully automated; however, in our example, we did not have this option configured, and you saw how fast and easy vendor creation was, regardless.
Creating refund checks is not a terribly difficult process in GP, but it does have a lot of steps that you can eliminate by using GP’s Refund Checks functionality. It’s especially helpful if you do refund checks regularly, and we highly recommend checking it out! As always, if you have questions or need help configuring any settings to achieve this process, Syvantis is here to help!
