Introduction
Finance Module
The Finance Module helps your business manage, monitor, and report on its financial processes and reconciliations.
Some of the key functions of the Finance Module are:
Raising and managing invoices for up-front costs
Monitoring financials with reports, work stacks, and dashboard widgets
Showing invoice and fund balances and activity for customer accounts
Reporting and monitoring assists with:
Calculating revenue
Business forecasting
This article is intended to give you a high-level idea of the key functions and features of the module and what they can do.
You will find links to more detailed articles within each section, where appropriate. These can also be accessed from the menu above.
Invoicing
The Layer allows you to invoice the upfront costs of sales order items. Invoices are raised in a draft status, and are finalised before being sent to customers.
Invoice and credit note templates
Customisable templates are used to generate invoice and credit note documents. This gives you control over branding, formatting, and content.
Invoice payments
The Finance module also lets you record payments against invoices you have raised.
The details of these payments are recorded against the invoice and the customer record.
Invoices and / or payments may be exported for upload to an external system, such as Sage 50, or synced directly to systems such as Sage 200, Intacct, and Affinity.
Payment methods
For each payment you can select a payment method.
Payment methods are fixed but these can be enabled or disabled as required. You can also assign account names and codes to each one.
Credit notes and refunds
Credit notes can be raised to offset an invoice balance, or an invoice payment that has been made.
Invoice payments can also be refunded through a credit note.
Funds
Customers can be provided with the following funds:
Buyout fund
Hardware fund
Subsidy fund
General fund
These funds can be seen on the Customer Balances widget on the left bar of a customer record.
Funds can be added to quotations.
They can be used when logging invoice payments, usually as a fund offset.
You can also use the general fund to help process credit card payments in The Layer.
Hardware funds allow you to provide a customer with funding for future hardware purchases.
Reporting
The Layer offers a range of finance-related reports that can be exported in spreadsheet format.
For general information on report access for users, check this article.
Examples of finance-related reports:
Invoices by Created Date
All Credit Notes
Customer Balance Report by Period (Date)
Work stacks
Work stacks (aka batch set browsers) are available for the following record types:
Invoices
Credit notes
Commissions
Invoice payments
Work stacks can be used to pull together records matching a particular set of parameters, such as creation date, status, owner etc.
General-purpose work stacks such as All invoices and Invoice payments can be used as the basis for filtering and sorting.
Some examples of more specific finance work stacks are:
Widgets
A range of finance-related dashboard widgets are available. Most of these can be configured to show information for a specific date range, user, team etc.
Some examples include:
For information on controlling widget access, check this article.
Supporting external systems and billing platforms
The Layer allows you to define external billing platforms, representing external systems or processes. You can then tie these to inventory items via billing routes.
An an advantage of this is that you can block the invoicing of certain items within The Layer.
The Layer also supports integrations with a range of external platforms. Some information is provided here for reference. Please speak to us at The Layer if you are interested.
Other useful articles for finance users
As a finance-focused user you will often be required to work with other modules within The Layer.
Some other tasks that may fall to finance users are detailed below.