Finance

Finance is where you raise and track customer invoices, record the vendor bills you owe, post manual journal entries, issue credit notes, and maintain your chart of accounts. Invoices, Bills & Payments, Journals, Accounts, and Credit Notes all have working screens. Budget is also listed as a Finance submodule, but it has no screens in this version — see Budget.

#Document relationships

Invoices, Bills & Payments, Journals, and Credit Notes each post their debit and credit lines to accounts you set up in Accounts — Accounts is the shared chart of accounts behind every other Finance screen, so it's worth setting up before relying on the ledger entries other records show. Recording a payment against an invoice isn't a submodule of its own; it's reached from the Invoices list, creates its own record against the chosen payment account, and reduces what the invoice still owes. Payments against bills are recorded on the bill's own page.

Container Depot has its own Invoices and Cashier screens for billing Main Line Operators for container handling, storage, and repairs. They're separate screens with their own permissions, documented in the Container Depot guide — this guide covers only the Invoices, Bills & Payments, Journals, Accounts, and Credit Notes screens under the Finance module itself.

#Access and permissions

You need a signed-in OCTO Ops account with a verified email address, an active membership in the selected organization, and the Finance module enabled for that organization.

Team owners and admins can use every Finance screen. Every other member is governed by the organization's permission groups:

Own records means records you created yourself; with an all records grant you see and open everyone's.

Three further permissions are special and are granted separately from the table above:

• Record payment for Bills & Payments lets a member record a payment against a bill from the bill's profile page. They also need the Edit permission for that bill.
• Record payment for Invoices lets a member record a payment against an invoice, separately from being able to create or edit invoices generally. It's reached from the Invoices list's Actions menu, not an invoice's own profile page. Before the payment is saved, OCTO Ops also checks that the member holds the Edit permission for the specific invoice they've chosen.
• Auto-apply credit notes lets a member run an automatic calculation that spreads a computed credit across a customer's open invoices and creates the credit notes for it, without picking each invoice by hand. It's used by the 3PL/Logistics workflow elsewhere in OCTO Ops, not from a Credit Notes screen, and it also needs the Create permission for Credit Notes.

#Business units

When your organization has business units, invoices, bills and credit notes each have a Business unit. A new one starts with the unit chosen in the header, and the lists filter and show the unit. A document of a unit that is, or sits under, a separate legal entity is numbered in that entity's own sequence and shows its prefix, for example PH-7; every other document continues your organization's numbers. Journals and payments have no business unit, and credit notes created by Auto-apply belong to your main business. An invoice raised from a sales order takes the order's business unit and is numbered by its legal entity; one from a main-business order belongs to your main business. Container Depot's invoices and cashier receipts have a business unit too, and the Sales invoice reports filter by it — see Reports.

#What you can do

• Create and track customer invoices, and record payments against them. See Invoices.
• Record vendor bills, pay them, and see what you still owe. See Bills & Payments.
• Post manual journal entries of debit and credit lines. See Journals.
• Maintain your chart of accounts. See Accounts.
• Create credit notes against a customer, and print the ones you've issued. See Credit Notes.
• Budget has no screens yet in this version. See Budget.

#Current limitations

• A journal isn't checked for balanced debits and credits before it's saved — see Journals.
• A line without a Product chosen (on an invoice or credit note) or an Account chosen (on a journal) is left out when you save, without any warning.
• Settings > Module settings > Finance's currency, exchange rate, and tax configuration is saved and editable, but doesn't yet affect any Invoice, Bill, Journal, Credit Note, or Account screen in this version — see Module settings.
• None of the five Finance submodules has a working Delete control in this version, even though a Delete permission exists in the matrix for each of them.
• Only Accounts has a working Edit screen — Invoices, Bills & Payments, Journals, and Credit Notes can't be edited from these screens.
• Only Credit Notes has working printing — no print option is available on an Invoice, Bill, Journal, or Account.
• A new Invoice, Bill, Journal, or Credit Note always starts with status Active, whatever other statuses might otherwise apply to it.
• A member holding a View permission for one of Invoices, Bills & Payments, Journals, or Credit Notes can open a specific record from a different one of those four by its link — see the note under Access and permissions.
• Budget has no screens at all — see Budget.
• There's no aging report, trial balance, profit-and-loss, balance sheet, or cash-flow report anywhere in OCTO Ops yet.