Apparel accounting software: the money side of the ERP that already holds the goods
AIMS360 carries receivables, payables and a general ledger of its own, costed at style, color and size. Invoices are raised from what actually shipped, vendor bills are matched against the purchase order and the receipt, factored invoices are assigned the moment they exist, and the month you closed stays closed. Your accounting package keeps the statements.
Does AIMS360 replace my accounting software?
Usually not, and it does not need to. AIMS360 has full accounts receivable, accounts payable and general ledger modules built in, so it is not dependent on an outside accounting package to function. Most apparel finance teams keep one anyway, because that is where the CPA works, where the tax tools live and where the financial statements come from.
So the normal shape is this. AIMS360 owns the operational money: the invoice raised from the shipment, the AR aging behind it, the credit limit that let the order through, the factor assignment, the retailer chargeback, the rep commission, the vendor bill matched against the purchase order, and the cost of goods calculated from the style that produced it. Your accounting package owns the statements. The integration posts mapped journal entries between the two, so the aging in AIMS360 and the balance in the ledger do not drift apart.
The question worth asking is not which accounting software, it is which system owns which number. Getting that wrong is what produces the month end argument.
| Number | Owned by | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory value at style, color and size | AIMS360 | No general ledger has a field for a size matrix, a prepack or a shade and fill range |
| Cost of goods sold | AIMS360, posted to the ledger | Calculated from the bill of materials and the production that consumed it |
| AR aging and credit limits | AIMS360 | Orders are approved or held at entry, before the goods move |
| Factor assignments and reserves | AIMS360 | Generic accounting packages do not model recourse, advance rates or holdbacks |
| Retailer chargebacks | AIMS360 | The deduction has to tie back to the shipment and the rule that caused it |
| Sales rep commissions | AIMS360 | Calculated on the posted invoice, with splits, style rates and holdbacks |
| Financial statements and tax filing | Your ledger and your CPA | Nothing there needs to know what a prepack is |
What retailers owe you, and what they will actually pay
Apparel receivables are not a list of open invoices. They are a list of open invoices minus the chargebacks, minus the markdown allowances, assigned to a factor, aged against terms that run from net 7 to net 120.
Aging that reconciles
Real time AR aging across every customer, division and factor, with current, 1 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, 91 to 120 and 120+ buckets. Drill from the bucket to the invoice, and reconcile to the receivable trial balance and the ledger control account without building a pivot table.
- Views by customer, factor, salesperson or division
- Past due thresholds and automatic credit holds
- Export to Excel or PDF for the accountant
Invoices raised from the shipment
The trigger is the completed pick ticket, so what gets billed is what left the building. Short ships and split shipments bill correctly because the shipped quantity carries forward, not the ordered quantity. The tracking number is written onto the invoice and the freight is reconciled rather than left as the estimate somebody typed at order entry.
- Automated invoicing the moment a pick ticket completes
- Batch invoicing for a whole shipping day in one run
- Per customer shipping pricing, discounted or upcharged, applied automatically
Factoring, wired into the order flow
Orders go to your factor for credit approval before the goods move, approvals come back onto the order and denials are flagged for review. When approved goods ship, each invoice is assigned to the factor with the right remittance details, so the retailer pays the factor and your funding is not waiting on paperwork.
- Recourse and non recourse, advance rates, holdbacks and factor specific fees, per assignment
- Factor assigned credits route through the factor, not back to the customer
- Factor approvals and assignments
Chargebacks with an owner
A retailer deduction should not be a mystery line on a remittance. Every chargeback is logged against the shipment and the compliance rule that caused it, then investigated, disputed and reported to resolution by dollar amount, whether it arrived through EDI, a vendor portal or a remittance advice.
- Prevention first: valid ASNs, GS1-128 labels and routing guide execution before cartons ship
- Deductions tracked to resolution rather than written off quietly
- Chargeback management
Six kinds of vendor bill a generic AP tool never sees
A consumer brand does not mainly pay office suppliers. It pays fabric mills, cut and sew contractors, dye houses, decorators, freight forwarders and customs brokers, and every one of those bills belongs against the job that created it.
| Bill | What it answers to | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor purchase orders | The PO for finished goods, raw materials or trims | The invoice has quantities, costs and dates to be checked against |
| Cut tickets | The cutting work commissioned against a style | The charge ties to the pieces that came back, not a vague expense line |
| Decoration | The work order for embroidery, screen print or embellishment | Decorated styles carry the true cost of the decoration |
| Garment dye | The dye house run, billed by lot | Dyed and undyed costs stay separate |
| Contractor bills | Sewing, finishing, pressing and packing jobs | Short deliveries surface before the payment goes out |
| Freight and duty | Carrier, forwarder and customs broker charges | Styles reflect landed cost, not just the vendor unit price |
Three way matching before a dollar leaves
The purchase order says what you agreed to pay. The receiving report says what arrived. The supplier invoice says what they billed. AIMS360 compares all three before the bill is approved, so a vendor billing for more than you ordered, or more than turned up, is caught rather than paid.
Payables that reach your ledger
Approved bills post to AP with freight and duty allocations included, then sync two ways with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, or post into Xero and Sage. The full flow is on accounts payable.
Inventory value that is calculated, not estimated
Margin in apparel is decided long before the invoice. It is decided in the bill of materials, in the contractor rate, in the freight and duty that landed with the container, and in the units that came back short.
Costed from the recipe
Fabric consumption, trims, labor operations and decoration roll up from the bill of materials to a style cost, so when a fabric price moves or a contractor rate changes the cost follows rather than sitting stale in a spreadsheet.
Average and weighted average cost
AIMS360 supports average cost accounting and the weighted average cost method, so inventory value, cost of goods sold and margin hold up across styles, colors, sizes, warehouses and work in process.
Work in process is a number, not a guess
Goods out at a contractor are still yours and still carry value. Production tracking holds the quantity at each stage per size, so WIP is a figure you can report rather than an adjustment you discover at close.
Shrinkage you can see
Physical inventory postings and style adjustments are recorded with an audit trail, so the gap between what the system said and what the count found is identified and dated instead of absorbed quietly into cost of goods.
Every way a wholesale buyer pays, in one place
A department store on net 60, a boutique on prepay, an international account on a letter of credit and a tradeshow walk up with a card are four different finance problems. They should not be four different systems.
Terms
Standard terms ship configured out of the box, covering net 7 through net 120, EOM dating, early pay discounts, wire, COD, letter of credit, ROG, prepay, consignment and memo, with unlimited custom terms built in setup rather than by a developer.
- A default term per customer, overridable per order
- Credit card only and prepayment required flags
- Credit limit checked at order entry, holds applied automatically
Card and ACH
AIMS360 Pay turns an invoice into a payment link the buyer can settle by credit card or ACH, and posts the payment straight against AR.
- Deposits at order, applied to the final invoice at shipment
- Pre authorization that includes estimated freight, so the warehouse does not pick an order the card cannot cover
- Tokenized card on file, with full numbers never stored
More than one currency
Multi-currency lets you price, book, invoice and collect in currencies other than your own, with exchange rates retrieved daily or fixed by you, a wholesale, suggested retail and portal price per currency, and unrealized and realized gain and loss reporting when the rate moves between invoice and payment.
More than one label
Divisions split the same company by label, or by men's, women's and children's, so orders, invoices, inventory and receivables can all be read per division without running a second company file and reconciling two sets of books.
Close the month, and keep it closed
An ERP is where backdating happens. Accounting software has had closing dates for decades, but the invoices, receipts and adjustments that feed the ledger are created in the operations system, and a receipt dated into last month after the books were posted is the usual reason the two stop agreeing.
The closing period lock is a closing date the admin sets in AIMS360 company settings. After it, nothing financial can be posted, changed or voided into the closed period unless the user holds the permission and confirms the prompt. Two permissions govern it and both are off by default.
The rule to remember: the lock is on the date, not on the record. An invoice from March is not frozen because it is old, it is frozen because March is on or before the closing date. Move the date forward and April freezes too.
| Family | What the lock holds |
|---|---|
| Invoices and voids | Revenue and receivables for the closed month stay what they were when you posted the journal |
| Payments | Cash receipts and batch payments cannot be applied into the closed period |
| AR adjustments | Write offs and manual receivable changes stop at the date |
| Chargebacks | Deductions accepted or rejected cannot be posted back into the closed month |
| Style and material adjustments | Closing inventory value stops moving, audit trail included |
| Inventory updates | Quantity changes, including physical inventory postings, are held to the open period |
| WIP receipts | Receipts against purchase orders, cut tickets and garment dye cannot land on a closed date |
| API posts | The lock applies to integrations and the open API, not only to what users type on screen |
Orders, pick tickets and shipments are not on that list. They are operations rather than financial postings, and the month end pack reads them as open work. The financial record of a shipment is the invoice, and that is what the lock holds.
Where the statements come from
AIMS360 posts mapped journal entries into the chart of accounts you already use. No CSV, no double entry, and no argument at month end about which system is right.
| System | How it connects | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise | Direct sync built and maintained by AIMS360 | Both ways |
| Xero | Direct sync, same object mapping as QuickBooks | Both ways |
| Sage Intacct | Direct connection through the Sage Intacct API | AIMS360 to Sage |
| Sage 100 | An AIMS360 connector installed beside your Sage 100 installation | AIMS360 to Sage |
| NetSuite | Scoped with your implementation team | Scoped |
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central | Scoped with your implementation team | Scoped |
What posts is the same set in every case: customer invoices with line level revenue, discount, freight and tax, card and ACH payments applied to the right invoice, credit memos and chargebacks against the original invoice, AP bills from purchase orders, customers and vendors, sales rep mapping, and COGS and inventory adjustments as mapped journal entries. The full breakdown, including what the integration does not do, is on the accounting integrations page.
What each part of AIMS360 accounting does
Receivables, payables, invoicing, payments, period control and the ledger connections, one page each.
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Common questions
What finance teams ask when they are working out where the ERP stops and the ledger starts.
AIMS360 has its own accounts receivable, accounts payable and general ledger, so it is not dependent on an outside accounting package. Most brands keep one anyway, because that is where the CPA works and where the financial statements and tax tools live. The practical arrangement is that AIMS360 runs the operational money and posts mapped journal entries into QuickBooks, Xero or Sage, which owns the statements.
Hold the shape of the business. No general ledger has a field for a style with a color and size matrix, a prepack, a shade and fill range, a cut ticket, a factor assignment with an advance rate and a holdback, or a retailer chargeback tied to a routing guide violation. Those are the numbers that decide your margin, and they are calculated before anything reaches the ledger. The ledger then receives the result rather than trying to model the operation.
Usually at the point where the spreadsheets beside the accounting package start deciding things. Common markers: SKU count past what the item list handles comfortably, inventory that has to be tracked by style, color and size rather than as one line, production out at contractors with value sitting in work in process, wholesale customers on factored terms, retailer chargebacks arriving against shipments, and orders coming from more than one channel. None of those is an accounting problem, which is why an accounting package cannot solve them.
QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Enterprise sync two ways, as does Xero. Sage Intacct connects through the Sage Intacct API and Sage 100 through an AIMS360 connector installed beside your Sage 100 installation, both posting from AIMS360 into Sage. NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are available as work scoped with your implementation team rather than switched on from a settings screen. Sage 50, Sage 300 and Sage X3 are not supported.
An accounts receivable aging report groups every open invoice by how long it has been outstanding. AIMS360 generates one on demand for any customer, factor, division or as of any date, with current, 1 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, 91 to 120 and 120+ day buckets, drill down to the invoice, and reconciliation to the receivable trial balance and the general ledger control account.
In two moments. Before the goods move, the order is sent to your factor for credit approval, the approval comes back onto the order and a denial is flagged for review so nothing ships on credit the factor never accepted. At invoicing, the invoice created from the shipped goods is assigned to the factor with the correct remittance details, so the retailer pays the factor. Recourse and non recourse, advance rates, holdback percentages and factor specific fees are configurable per assignment, and factor assigned credits route through the factor rather than back to the customer.
Three way matching compares the purchase order, the receiving report and the supplier invoice before a bill is approved. It matters in apparel because the bills are production bills. A contractor who was given 1,200 pieces and returned 1,150 should not be paid for 1,200, and a fabric invoice priced above the PO should surface before payment rather than after. When the bill, the PO and the receipt live in the same system, the check is automatic.
From the recipe that produced the goods. Fabric consumption, trims, labor operations and decoration roll up from the bill of materials, freight and duty captured in payables land on the style as part of landed cost, and inventory is valued using average cost or the weighted average cost method across styles, colors, sizes, warehouses and work in process. The resulting COGS and inventory adjustments post to your ledger as mapped journal entries.
Yes. An admin sets a closing date in AIMS360 company settings, and after that nothing financial can be posted, changed or voided into the closed period: no invoice, payment, receivable adjustment, chargeback, style or material adjustment, or work in process receipt, whether entered on screen or sent through the API. Two permissions can allow an authorized correction, both are off by default, and any correction is recorded with the user, date and time.
Yes, on the selling side. With multi-currency switched on, each customer, sales rep and factor carries a currency, each style carries a wholesale, suggested retail and portal price per currency, and orders, invoices, payments and receivables hold the currency and the exchange rate of the day. Rates are retrieved daily by default or can be fixed by you, and unrealized and realized gain and loss reports show what the movement between invoice and payment cost or earned.
On the posting date of the invoice, not the order date and not the payment date, so reps earn on shipped and invoiced sales. More than one rep can split a single order at their own rates, rates can vary by style, holdbacks can wait for the customer's payment, and each rep gets a statement showing what they earned and why. The rep mapping carries across to your ledger so reporting stays consistent.
Yes. A retailer chargeback is a compliance deduction taken out of your wholesale payment, not a card dispute. AIMS360 logs each one against the shipment and the rule that triggered it, tracks the dispute to resolution by dollar amount, and posts the accepted deductions as credits against the original invoice in your ledger. The prevention side matters more than the accounting side: accurate ASNs, GS1-128 labels and routing guide execution stop most of them before the cartons leave.
What shipped. The invoice is raised from the completed pick ticket, so the shipped quantity is what carries forward and short ships and split shipments bill correctly. The tracking number is written onto the invoice and the freight is reconciled against the shipment rather than left as an earlier estimate, with each account's own discounted or upcharged shipping pricing applied automatically.
It does not file your taxes, run payroll or produce statutory reporting, which stay with your accounting package and your CPA. It does not fix a chart of accounts that is wrong: it posts neatly against the mapping you set, so someone who understands your accounts has to sit in the mapping session. It does not reconcile history either. If AIMS360 and your ledger start out of balance, the sync keeps them in step from that point forward rather than repairing what came before.
Where the money touches the rest of the system
Last reviewed 16 September 2026 by the AIMS360 team. Accounting scope and ledger connections reflect the AIMS360 configuration as of that date and are confirmed for your setup during implementation. AIMS360 does not provide accounting, tax or legal advice. Product and company names belong to their owners.
Bring your chart of accounts
We will show you where an invoice, a card payment, a credit memo, a vendor bill and a COGS entry each land in your accounts, run an AR aging that reconciles to the control account, and set a closing date so you can watch a backdated posting get stopped.
