Still considering switching from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central? In this blog series, we’re exploring new videos that take you through the differences and similarities in work processes. First up was entering receivables transactions. Today, we’re looking at paying vendors.
Stay tuned for the next video in this series that will compare the work process of entering payables transactions in Dynamics GP and Business Central.
If you need help with your Dynamics GP to Business Central migration, contact TrinSoft today.
Video transcript:
In this video, we’re going to look at how to pay vendors in Dynamics GP and compare that to the experience of paying vendors in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
In my GP system, I’ve created a batch using my default payment option ID that looks for outstanding invoices that are due at the end of the month and any available discounts.
Since I’ve already created my payment batch, I can select the Edit Payment Batch button and then view all the vendors and invoices that have been selected to pay. Here is where I can make any changes and choose to not pay a certain vendor or certain invoices.
Now let’s see how we can pay vendors in Business Central. Business Central allows you to easily create payment journals and suggest the vendors to pay based on criteria you’ve defined, similar to GP.
Let’s take a closer look. To create vendor payments I’ll click on the search icon and type in Payment Journals. Based on the search results I can then select Payment Journal.
In my payment journals, I can select my General batch. Under Prepare, I’ll select Suggest Vendor Payments. Similar to my payment option ID in GP, I can select previously saved defaults so that I don’t need to re-enter information each time I create vendor payments.
The Last Payment Date is how I can indicate that we want to pay invoices due on or before that date, and we’ve also indicated to include any available payment discounts. Now let’s click OK and have Business Central suggest a list of payments based on the criteria we’ve entered.
In this list, you can see the system has created several payments for my vendors. I currently have the system set up to create one payment per invoice. However, in a moment we’ll look at how we can change that setting.
Here I can see the amounts of the payments and the invoices they are applied to. Now, let’s say we’re a bit cash-strapped this month, and it looks like this payment run will come to about $40,000. By using the vendor priority functionality in Business Central the suggested payments will ensure that we’re paying our high-priority vendors first.
To see the vendor priority let’s open up a vendor card. In the vendor card, I can go under the Payments area and see the Priority. The lower the number, the higher the priority. We see World Wide Importers is set to a priority 1.
Now let’s go back and run a payment again, paying only our high-priority vendors. First I’m going to select all my payments so that I can delete them and then regenerate them.
Back under the Suggest Vendor Payments, I’m now going to select the option to Use Vendor Priority. I am also going to type in that we want to pay $20,000 towards our vendor invoices for the month.
We will then choose to summarize per vendor or create one payment per vendor. Now you can see the system has reduced the number of payments to only our priority 1 vendors. Through the use of vendor priority and suggest payments, Business Central has helped streamline paying your most strategic vendors and giving you better control of your cash flow.
