What is Accounts Receivable?

Accounts Receivable is a web-based billing and collection system for local units billing external customers. External customers include Harvard-affiliated individuals who pay for services using their own funds rather than those of the University when purchasing goods or services from Harvard, and non-affiliated individuals, corporations, universities, and hospitals that purchase goods and services from the University. Oracle Receivables is part of the Oracle Financial e-business suite. AR currently supports over 100 local billing units.

Features of Accounts Receivable

The Accounts Receivable application can be used to:

• Create customer invoices and credit memos
• Answer invoice-related customer account questions
• Run Accounts Receivable reports
• Track collections activity

Getting customers into the system: Customers must be set up in the Customer Master File (CMF) before an invoice can be created and sent to them. For more information concerning customer set up, see the Accounts Receivable information at the ABLE site.

Getting invoices into the system: Invoices are entered into the system in one of three ways:

• They can be entered manually into the AR system by a local billing unit
• Entered into the AR system by Central AR (for units with very few invoices)
• Loaded via a file from local billing systems to the AR system