Consolidated Electrical Distributors (CED) invoices, statements & job accounts

Who CED is

Privately held electrical distributor with hundreds of locations across the United States, each run by a local manager with real authority over pricing, credit, and service.

How the account is structured (one company, but each branch keeps its own book)

CED runs on a branch model: one company on paper, but every location keeps its own customers, its own credit decisions, and its own statement. Your account at one branch is not automatically an account at the next one over.

What that means for your books: treat each CED branch you buy from as its own supplier. Separate account numbers, a separate statement each month, separate job-reference setup, and a separate authorized-buyer list. The upside is speed — the manager who can fix a mis-keyed ticket is standing at the counter.

CED specifics

CED is deliberately decentralized: every location is managed as its own business, with its own manager, its own credit decisions, and its own way of doing things. For a contractor that's mostly upside — the person setting your pricing is standing behind the counter — but it has a paperwork consequence. Your account at one CED branch is not automatically an account at another, and the statement you get is the branch's, not a national roll-up.

If you buy from more than one CED location, treat them as separate suppliers in your books: separate account numbers, separate statements, separate reconciliations. Job references are set branch by branch too, so when you add a project, tell every branch you use, not just the one you were standing in.

The upside of the local model is that fixes are fast. A ticket keyed to the wrong account, a return with no credit memo, a price that didn't match the quote — the manager who can correct it is usually reachable the same day, as long as you have the invoice number in hand.

The setup that makes CED tickets file themselves

• Ask for a job account per active project. Give the branch your job list; the job name then prints from their system instead of being typed at the counter. Do this at every CED location you use.
• Ask for a required job reference on counter sales, so a blank-job ticket gets stopped at the register.
• Use job names your crew actually says. “SMITH-KITCHEN” survives the counter; “Job 2024-117” comes back as 2024-171 half the time.
• Keep the authorized-buyer list current. The account is a charge card with your name on it; tell the branch the day someone leaves.
• Snap the ticket at the counter. Flat, four corners in frame, before you walk out — the counter is the one moment the ticket is guaranteed to be in your hand.

Month end: pay from invoices, reconcile with the statement

The CEDstatement isn't a bill — it's an audit. Match every invoice number on it to a ticket or packing slip you hold, circle the lines with no match and call the branch with the invoice number, verify every return became a credit memo, and check that last month's payment landed on the right invoices. Because CED accounts are managed location by location, expect one statement per location and run the routine for each. The whole routine is twenty minutes a month if your side of the paper was captured as it happened — see statements vs. invoices.