Should I assign account status to customers if I don't plan on sending statements or allowing charge accounts?

If you assign account status to customers in Store Ops, you are normally granting those customers the right to charge purchases to their accounts. This feature also activates receivables along with the option to print statements, assess finance charges, etc.

Many specialty retailers would only want to do this for a small group of customers who are allowed to charge items or drop off items for service and repair. The remaining customers will not be assigned account status, but you can take deposits against layaways, workorder and backorders. You do not need to assign customers account status to do this.

One reason to use account status might be for Employee Purchase Accounts, where employees are allowed to charge items to their account and make payments to that account. You can also assign a credit limit and maximum purchase amount per month. This would allow employees to charge up to a preset amount by month, then require them to pay down their balance if they want to charge more.

Some retailers will want to assign account status when customers put money down on a yet unassigned product. This could be a special order deposit for an item that is not in the current database. In this case you could assign account status to the customer, leave the credit limit set to zero, and apply a payment to their account. This creates a credit balance that can be used against future purchases, but does not allow charges to the account for more than their credit amount.

Another way to handle this is to leave account status out of the equation and take a deposit on a workorder, layaway or backorder. To do so requires an item to be sold or a dummy 'deposit' code to be sold. You can also sell a special order item code generated with AutoGen.

There are suggestions on the various methods of processing special orders and deposits elsewhere on this Knowledge Base. Search for "autogen" or "special order" or "deposit".