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How Automated Vendor Invoicing in Dynamics 365 for Finance Can Improve Efficiency
Posted on: March 23, 2022 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing
It is important for companies to ensure timely payment for goods and services to maintain a strong relationship with their supplier. Therefore, guaranteeing the timeliness of Accounts Payable is imperative. However, you might have experienced that manual invoicing takes a lot of time, is inefficient, and is very susceptible to human error. Do you ever worry that with manual invoicing you might miss payments that would lead to fines and hurt the relationship with your suppliers? Luckily, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has added a new feature that will allow you to automate invoices. Now, accounts payable solutions are automated to offer a smooth way to accelerate and enhance visibility into invoicing processes.
This blog will describe the capability for automating your vendor invoice processing and the benefits of using an automated process.
What Invoice Automation Tasks does Dynamics 365 Finance Perform?
The automation processes can be used to perform these tasks:
- Automatically apply prepayments to vendor invoices
- Automatically submit imported invoices to the workflow system.
- Match product receipts to pending vendor invoice lines.
- Simulate posting before a vendor invoice is posted.
- Quickly and efficiently view workflow and automation history.
- View and analyze the results of automating vendor invoice processing.
- Resume automated processing for multiple invoices.
Submit imported vendor invoices to the workflow system
The capability to automatically submit imported invoices to the workflow system requires that your process begins with an imported invoice. Invoices that are manually entered and invoices that are created using the Vendor collaboration invoicing workspace must be manually submitted to the workflow system. Prepayment application processing must be performed manually for imported invoices. You can manually apply prepayments before or after posting the imported invoice. You can manually apply prepayments to unposted standard invoices using the Vendor invoices page. After posting, the settled prepayment will be available to manually apply to other invoices from this vendor on the Vendors page (Accounts payable > Common > Vendors > All vendors > Invoice tab > Apply).
Match product receipts to invoice lines that have a three-way matching policy
Posted product receipts can be automatically matched to invoice lines that a three-way matching policy is defined for. The process will run until the matched product receipt quantity equals the invoice quantity. As part of this process, you can specify the maximum number of times that the system should try to match product receipts to an invoice line before it concludes that the process failed. The process will run in the background, either hourly or daily. You can run the automated matching process as part of the process for submitting invoices to the workflow system. Alternatively, you can run it as a standalone process.
Pre-validate through simulated posting
Posting simulation completes the validation steps that are done during the posting process for vendor invoices, but no accounts are updated. To run the process, you can select either a single invoice or multiple invoices on the Pending vendor invoices page.
Viewing workflow and automation historical information
An easy-to-read view of vendor invoice workflow history is provided. The automation history helps you identify the current process step, as well as the steps that have already been completed. When a step is unsuccessful, detailed information will be provided to help you understand the reason for the failure.
Analytics and metrics
The Vendor invoice entry workspace lets you focus on vendor invoices that didn’t make it through the automated process. Tiles on the workspace list information about vendor invoices that weren’t successfully submitted to the workflow system, imported, or matched to product receipts.
Resume automation processing for multiple invoices
When an imported invoice isn’t successfully submitted to a workflow using the automated process, the system will remove it from further automated processing. An accounts payable clerk can review and edit the invoice before the automated process resubmits it to workflow.
Tracking the Imported invoice amount and Imported sales tax amount values
The Imported invoice amount and Imported sales tax amount values for vendor invoices can be provided in the vendor invoices import file. Typically, these values are from an invoice that was scanned by an outside provider and included in the import file. As the invoice is processed in Accounts payable, the values will be calculated based on the invoice data. The invoice can be posted only if the imported values match the calculated values. Matching values ensure that the invoice accurately reflects the amount that is due to the vendor.