End of month parts to service clearing account process

What reports and processes you follow in Eclipse for your end of month is a business decision, however, there are some suggested duties to do with clearing accounts that we recommend to ensure your departments are working together and that is accurately represented in your financials.

What are the clearing accounts?

In Eclipse there are two default clearing accounts. The Sublet Clearing and the Parts to Service Clearing account. They act as “work in progress” accounts for contracted work and parts sold internally before the service work has been completed and the customer has been invoiced. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the end figure of these accounts at the end of the month to ensure it represents the open work your business has at the time.

How is the parts to service clearing account used?

Parts to Service Clearing is an account used for the interim time between a parts invoice being processed to a repair order while it is still in progress, and the repair order being invoiced out. This account will also be used if your dealership posts parts to sales of stock in Stock and Accounting. Because of this, this GL account will likely never be $0 as work should usually be in progress.   

If a parts invoice has been invoiced to the clearing account but the repair order is yet to be invoiced the parts posting should be alone like this:

Once the Repair Order is invoiced, it will create the second posting and look like the below:

Understanding the ledger references

To be able to monitor your parts to service clearing account, you first need to understand how the ledger utilizes references.

Type refers to the type of invoice created in Eclipse.
PIN = Parts Invoice
SIN = Service Invoice
VSL = Vehicle Sale

Ref columns use identifiers unique to the invoice or stock unit.
PI = Parts Invoice
RI = Repair Invoice
SN = Stock Number

In the below example, we are focusing on Type, Ref 1, and Ref 2.

The first posting into the parts to service clearing account has a type of Parts Invoice. Ref 1 is the Parts Invoice Number. Ref 2 is the Repair Order Number.

From this we can gather that a parts invoice (1003) was processed to a repair order (1002)

The second posting into the parts to service clearing account has a type of Service Invoice. Ref 1 is the Parts Invoice Number. Ref 2 is the Repair Order Number.

Because this posting has a type of SIN, this means that this posting is when the Service Invoice was processed.

How to monitor your parts to service clearing account.

Run the ledger to get the results that are yet to clear out  

Run the ledger enquiry exactly like the below to bring the results of everything currently in the account that hasn’t yet been reconciled off against another posting.

Using the sort option set as “Reference” and “Reconciled” will remove lines that sum to 0 and have the same reference. When you run the ledger by this, there should only be figures in the debit column.

Your Parts to Service Clearing account may be a different number than the example below

Review dollar figure in account

You can do this by looking at the end figure on the last page of the results. That is the dollar figure of the Parts invoiced to open Repair Orders or Pending Sales.  

This account should never be in credit

Spot check the oldest postings in results
What you are checking for is that all of the postings/line items have an open Repair Order (RO), or a Pending Sale. The easiest way to do this is to check the oldest postings and cross reference the Ref 2 with the matching Repair Orders and Sales. 

To do this:

1.  Open the Service Module and run the Open Repair Order Summary Report. Reports/Mailing > Reports > Open Repair Order Summary. Do NOT enter a start date and make the Report ‘As at Date’ the date you are running the report. For Sort Options, choose RO# > OK. 
2. Take the RO number from the Ref 2 column (highlighted yellow below) and look for that in the Open Repair Order Summary Report.  If we look at the report, we can see that repair order is in the report and the dollar figure matches the posting.  
3. If you can find the repair order in the report and the dollar figure matches the ledger result, that is where you can stop. If the RO number is NOT on the report, you would need to investigate why the RO parts dollar figure has not cleared out.

Please note: If you only use the clearing account for Parts on Repair orders (not parts on stock sales), then the end figure of the reports parts column should match the selection total of the results in step 2 of these instructions and you will only need to spot check postings if the dollar figure does not match.

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