About Lay-bys

Lay-bys are a class of sales order. The transaction is saved as a Lay-by order instead of an Invoice.

Workflow

Processing a lay-by involves performing some or all of the following tasks:

• Create the new lay-by with an initial deposit
• Accept deposits against the lay-by
• Recall the lay-by to be amended
• Supply the lay-by

All lay-bys are assigned an order number. This number must be referenced when working with lay-bys that have been previously created.

The lay-by purchaser can be identified by one of three methods:

• Create a separate Debtor account. This is best if the purchaser requires statements across multiple lay-bys.
• Create a new contact within the default lay-by account. The individual lay-by acts as similar to a sub account in that all deposits and invoices can be viewed directly from the Order History. This method allows full contact details to be recorded (similar to an account) but:
• • Does not extend the size of the merchant’s trial balance.
  • Provides the features provided by the marketing Classes within Contacts.
  • This method requires the profile setting Contacts on Transactions to be active.
• Enter the purchaser’s contact details into the delivery address. A lay-by order will always insist on a non-blank delivery address.

Setup

Lay-bys require the following Company-level profile settings to be enabled:

• Enable POS Laybys
• Enable extended sales order statuses
• Allow deposits in sales orders and general ledger

It is also likely that you will want to take a deposit payment when creating a new Lay-by so you may also wish to review the initial deposit % via the Minimum Layby Deposit Percentage profile setting.

When entering a new lay-by or processing a deposit, the account number defaults to the account specified in User-level profile setting Default debtor account number for new lay-bys. This is useful when using a separate debtor clearing account for processing lay-bys.

The workflow used to identify the lay-by when processing deposits can be customised by changing the User-level profile setting Initial Focus for POS. Set this to indicate which field should receive focus when starting a transaction in POS:

• Default - Use this option to obey the Invoice Header Skip profile setting. For deposits, this also launches the order number search screen automatically.
• Account Number - Use this option to start in the Account field.
• Contact Number - Use this option to start in the Contact field. The account will be determined automatically. Requires the Add debtor contact details to transactions profile setting to be active.
• Order Number - Use this option if you process lay-bys and want to start in the order number field (deposits). For Non-Deposit transactions this defaults to Contact if active. Otherwise, it's Customer.