Get More Value from the Customer Age Analysis and Service Tickets

If you already use BOS Enterprise, you may be sitting on features that can save time, improve follow-up, and give you better visibility into customer accounts—without changing the way your team already works. The Customer Age Analysis is one of those tools: practical, powerful, and often underused.

Beyond showing outstanding balances, it can help you spot risks earlier, respond to overdue accounts faster, and make more confident decisions about credit exposure and customer follow-up. A few small changes in how you use it can make a noticeable difference to cash flow and daily efficiency.

You can also tailor the view to suit your workflow. The available columns show details such as invoice age, terms, credit limits, and currency. You can customise the layout by including or excluding the fields most relevant to your team using the Field Chooser (*).

Don’t Overlook the Unallocated Column

One of the most useful columns to keep an eye on is the unallocated column. When a value appears here, it usually means there is a payment on the account that has not yet been matched to an invoice. This could happen for several different reasons:

• the payment must still be matched to an invoice,

• a credit note that was issued after an invoice was paid,

• a deposit was paid for a future order,

• or an accidental overpayment.

To resolve these entries, click the item and select View Detailed Ledger from the context menu. You can then adjust the date range to display more entries and review the account history more clearly. If the account is in credit, the balance is displayed in red, making it easier to spot where to investigate next.

A helpful next step is to right-click the entry and choose Open transaction from the context menu. From there, you can allocate the transaction if needed or check whether the person who captured it left a note that explains the entry.

A faster way of allocating all the outstanding receipts is to view the transactions: From the ledger select Transaction Type (Transactions) > Customer Receipts (CR). For the filters, select No Date and check the checkbox next to Outstanding. Open the first transaction, change the status to an editable status (e.g. Pending) if necessary and allocate the receipt. Then use the navigational arrows to scroll through the list of transactions, editing them as you go.

Include Work in Process for Better Visibility

If you haven’t activated it yet, enabling Work in Process (WIP) on the age analysis can give you a more complete picture of customer exposure. Including WIP helps you see whether a customer is likely to exceed their credit limit and whether you are continuing work for clients whose accounts are already overdue.

This extra visibility can help you make practical cash flow decisions sooner—such as requesting a deposit, pausing further work, or reviewing whether an order should continue until outstanding amounts are settled.

Make Overdue Follow-Up Easier

BOS Enterprise includes several features that can make overdue account follow-up more consistent and less time-consuming.

First, you can create additional email templates for customer statements, so your communication is quicker and more consistent. For example, one template can politely confirm that a statement is attached, another can be used for overdue accounts, and a third can notify customers that their account has been suspended until payment is received.

Second, you can also create a service ticket to track account queries and follow-up actions. Right-click an overdue account and select [Create/Update a Service Ticket] on the context menu. From there, you can assign the ticket to a team member, set reminder and due dates, and send the client a pre-written notification. If reminder dates are important to your process, you can also display them on the age analysis (the field is hidden by default).

Service tickets are especially helpful if you regularly follow up with the same customers. By clicking the Company radio button next to responses, you can immediately view all tickets created for that company. This gives you useful context—such as whether the customer is consistently late with payments or whether the issue is unusual.

The service ticket also brings together other helpful information. For example, clicking the Company radio button on the Transaction Tab lets you see how many orders the customer is placing, while the Timekeeping tab can help your staff track time spent on account follow-up.

Take Payments Directly from the Age Analysis

If a customer wants to settle their account while they are with you, the age analysis makes that easy. Simply right-click their record and choose Receive Payment from the context menu.

This opens the Customer Receipt form, where you can select the invoices being paid. If the customer is paying cash, the form can also calculate change. If you deal with walk-in customers, this feature can save time and simplify the payment process once it has been set up.

Use Batch Update to Save Time

Another time-saving feature is Batch Update. From the age analysis interface, you can update multiple accounts at once—for example, changing overdue accounts to suspended, reactivating suspended accounts, or updating credit limits, billing methods, and terms. Just keep in mind that users need the appropriate access rights to make these changes.

Get a Quick Snapshot with Customer Summary

For a broader view of a customer account, right-click an entry on the age analysis and choose View Customer Summary from the context menu. This summary gives you fast access to useful account information, including contact details if you want to call the customer straight away.

On the Account tab, you can view a graph showing quotations, orders, and invoices, which helps you understand how active the customer has been recently. You can also see whether the credit limit is secured and review transaction lists for specific dates, giving you more context before making account decisions.

Next Steps

If you would like to go further, our documentation explains all the fields in the Customer Age Analysis and includes short tutorials on how to use selected functions.

The easiest way to get more from BOS Enterprise is to pick one or two of these features and start using them this week. Whether you enable WIP visibility, create service tickets for overdue follow-up, or start taking payments directly from the age analysis, each step can help your team work smarter and respond faster. If you haven’t explored these options recently, now is a great time to revisit the Customer Age Analysis and make sure you’re getting its full value.