Chasing down vendor invoices shouldn't eat up your day. Telka Clem, a pre-sales solution architect at Western Computer, walks through how to enter and post purchase invoices, run the aged accounts payable report, and pay vendors by check or ACH in Dynamics 365 Business Central. This walkthrough uses the Accounts Payable Coordinator role center, so you can see what quick access to your daily tasks looks like in practice.
Video transcript:
Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today as we start talking about accounts payable in D365 Business Central. I'm Telka Clem, and I am one of the pre-sales solution architects here at Western Computer. As we start looking at accounts payable in Business Central, I want to give you a little tour of how to enter and post a purchase invoice, how to run the aged accounts payable report, and then look at paying your vendors inside of Business Central with checks or ACS. So, let's jump into Business Central. And you will note that I am using an accounts payable coordinator's role center for our demo today. I'm doing that because it's really nice to have the information that you might need for your daily task available to you very quickly. You're seeing here that around accounts payable, I've got posted documents, purchase documents, also my favorites list or I like to call it my favorites list really calls out vendors and purchase orders and purchase invoices. Now, we have another video around purchase orders that you can enjoy where we're talking about purchasing inventory and receiving that inventory. But today we're going to be looking at purchase invoices. And you know, these would be invoices like rent that you get every month or an insurance bill or the cell phone bill that you post each month. So those type of invoices. And then as we start looking at the postings of those, I want to show you some added features on the purchase invoice itself. But just to note as we're using this RO center again, you can personalize this based on the information that you want to see. We talk a lot about making sure that we are one to two clicks away from any given information at any given time. That is one of the nice features of Business Central. So I've got payment information here, document approvals around POS or purchase invoices. Also, you can have list of different types of lists that are available. This one's overdue purchase invoices and then charts. Also remember that Power BI can be embedded inside of Business Central. So maybe you've got some Power BI reports around vendor performance or something like that. Now, let's look at some creating some purchase invoices. And I'm going to go to our purchase invoice list and click on new. Now, remember that Business Central has a dynamic search. So, if I don't know the entire name of a vendor, I can just start typing and it will find that vendor for me. Now, as I entered Seattle Health, you'll note that several things defaulted in today. I've got my address. I've got dates that have come in. Also, if this vendor was a different currency vendor, then the currency code would populate in. I'll skip the lines for right now. And let's go down and look that, you know, I got payment terms and an area code and a tax area code from my vendor card. But you'll note that I populated some lines here. These are standard lines for this vendor. And the way you would use these is if you have a vendor that you know you're paying every month. Let's think of the electric bill or the cell phone bill or things along those lines. I can set up standard lines for this vendor that will populate in into the purchase invoice. Where this is done is I can get directly over to the vendor card with one click there's that you know one click to get to anything one to two clicks and then under related under purchases you're going to find recurring purchase lines. under the recurring purchase lines, you're able to set up a new code, what you want that to uh look like. But if I go into the card here, you'll notice that I have assigned a GL account type, a uh account number, the quantity, you know, the area code, the customer group that I want to populate in. you're able to do all of the different areas or options that you're able to do on the purchase invoice like the GL account or an item or a resource, whatever it is that you are paying that vendor for. So, that's a really handy way of doing recurring lines if you have something that happens on a regular basis. Now, I have it where it's populating in the dollar amount from a purchase price table, but you do not have to do that. Let's say it's the electric bill and it changes every month. You would not want to populate in that amount. You'd want to enter it each time. Also, you're going to need to enter an invoice number in order for this to be able to be able to post. You would then post this invoice and then you know go about your next invoice that you would want to create. So I'll just create a new one here and let's enter this for let's say Frank's place. Again I'm going to default in the information I've got. I can enter the invoice number. As I'm entering my in, it's telling me that invoice number already exists. And oops, I forget forgot to put an eight on the end. So that's going to keep you from, you know, paying multiple or a single invoice multiple times. It's a nice feature with inside of Business Central. But let's come down here to the lines and I'm going to go ahead and choose that I want to uh populate this with a an account for advertising expense. I get build once a year for advertising expense. And as a result of that, I actually want to do what's called a deferral code on this invoice. Let me enter an amount here and we'll be able to look and see what this is for. And let's go ahead and say this is for the sales department. As I look back at this base year and I've got $5,000 here, what Business Central can allow us to do is create deferral templates or deferral schedules so that either on a straight line basis equal per period, days per period, or a you userdefined schedule, I can then have Business Central create the expenses on the dates you're seeing below. This is extremely handy for things that need to be deferred over a schedule, whether it's quarterly or yearly. You're seeing here, I can define the number of periods and when I want it to start. So, this gives me the opportunity to create those entries across the year so that I don't have to have a reoccurring journal each month that moves money from a prepaid expense or a prepaid invoice to an expense. As I start looking at posting this, I'll just do a posting preview here. You'll see how this is going to actually be invoiced across the year in the fact that 15232 is an acred environment. Now that's named incorrectly likely, but it would be a prepaid invoice. the full invoice is going to go in and then pieces are going to come out and then I'm going to have my advertising expense hit on those same dates. One of the other things to call out here is if I had an in if I had multiple companies and I had an invoice that needed to be expensed across those multiple companies. I can create a second line here for my interco company partner so that maybe 2500 goes to one company 2500 goes to the second company and what will happen upon post is Business Central will handle the due to due froms for that amount to the other company and then also post the expense on the other company's site. So, that's a couple of nice to haves when it comes to invoicing. I also can attach documents here that will follow through to the posted invoice so that when I'm trying to do any type of research inside of Business Central, I'm able to see the original invoice that's handled there as well. I'll go ahead and exit this and exit this one. And uh so as I post invoices, I am creating you know my my liabilities and from the vendor list. You can see what your payments look like, what balances we have with customers and then what balances are due at any given time. So let's look at an aged accounts payable report as you know part of our learning today. And here you will see that I can have different type of report layouts. I happen to be looking at the one that's just defaulted out of the box. I can age as of any date that I want to look at. And I've got three options here. either due date, transaction date, or document date. I'll just choose due date. And then I also can choose the length of my aging periods. Just look at 30 days. That's pretty standard. I've got some other options. Maybe I want to print my amounts that are due in the vendor's currency if we're dealing with currency codes. Do I want to print detail? Do I want to look at the external document number, which is that vendor's invoice number, and then I can print this to Excel? I don't want to right now, but I can if I wanted to. A couple of other things is you're able to filter on any type of vendor filter that you might be looking for. Maybe you have your vendors broken out between domestic and foreign and you want to uh just look at your domestic vendors. You can do that as well. Just note that I can also schedule this report. I can have it create itself every Monday morning at 6:30 in the morning if I want to. I also can send it out to Word or there's my Excel options if I want to, but I'm just going to go ahead and create it as a as a PDF. And let's turn that back off and do a preview here. I'm going to go ahead and enlarge this so you can see it a little better. But we can see that we owe Seattle Health $5,000 for invoice number one 123. And then be supply has a really large uh group of invoices that we uh owe them. As I look through this, you'll be able to see, you know, that you're going to get those invoice numbers by vendor. I've got phone numbers and contacts if I've got those available to me. And then the total amount due and then what my aging buckets look like. Here's 700. that's up to 30 days and then this is over 60. So you really have control over the accounts payable report of what you see on the report based on some of the toggles that you're able to turn on and turn off as well as whether you want to look at it by due date, transaction date or the document date itself or then also that length of aging periods. Lastly, let's go ahead and look at how we would pay our vendors. And we're going to look for the payment journal itself. Now, I did this just to show you how easy it is to bookmark a task onto our RO center. If I do this on a regular basis, you'll notice that I've put the payment journal here now, and it's very accessible very quickly. Let's go ahead and delete the lines that we've had in this batch before and then we'll go ahead and reather up who we need to pay. So, the first thing we're going to do is go to prepare. We're going to suggest our vendor payments and then choose the date that we want to look out to. Maybe you pay out to Friday or something along those lines. Of course, you're always going to want to look for your uh payment discounts. You can use vendor priorities, certain dollar amounts. I can summarize per vendor if I'm sending AC's. And then I'll want to enter my posting date. This is the date that we will date the payments. And then go ahead and I'm going to choose a bank account. Let's go from our operating account. And then let's say we're doing electronic payments today, but we can also create computer checks. We can also do manual checks and international electronic payments. So, you've got a lot of options available to you. Again, as you're gathering up who it is we're going to pay, you're noticing that it's very quickly looking through my vendor list in order to determine who we are going to send payment to today. I can evaluate these this list. Let's say that for Bev Supply, I just want to go ahead and filter on them only. and maybe I'm only going to pay a certain number of their invoices. So, let's just mark several to delete. That allows me to, you know, choose what it is I want to pay for bev supply. And then I've got all of my others here as well. Now, I can easily go ahead and print checks. If I print checks and they are incorrect, I have the ability to void them. void a single check or void all checks or I can also create an export for my bank so that I can export out my AC's. All of this is built into Business Central so that you can do either of those tasks. And here at Western Computer, we can help you with all of the setup. That's part of the implementation so that we train you how to use all this functionality to the point where you're really comfortable before you would go live. I want to thank you for joining me as we've looked at these this very small area of accounts payable and I look forward to you joining us for some of our other videos. Thank you.