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Managing Cash Flow with Dynamics 365 Finance Insights
Posted on: July 20, 2022 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing
Cash flow is essential to any business. Companies can face insolvency if they don’t maintain the cash flow to meet immediate needs. Therefore, it is important for a business owner to understand their cash position with cash flow forecasting. Without understanding a company’s cash position and forecasting cashflow, it makes it almost impossible to make informed business decisions, plan for change and know how you can enable business growth. By plotting out the expected cash movements of each element of your business, it will allow you to plan for the future. The cash flow forecasting capability in Finance insights can help companies monitor and manage their cash balances effectively. This feature uses machine learning to help businesses forecast cash flows more accurately than they have previously. It can also help managers make decisions that optimize opportunities in the context of their current cash position.
This blog will detail the difficulties of managing cash flow and how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Insights can make it a simple and automated process.
Cash position is the projection of cash flow that is forecast for the near term. It’s based on the projection of cash receipts from customers that pay outstanding invoices and orders, and also on the projection cash disbursements that are paid to vendors for purchase invoices and orders.
When the system predicts customer payments, it uses the payment predictions from the customer payment prediction feature. Without payment predictions, the average time that is required to convert a customer invoice to a payment for each customer is used to calculate a payment date. For open customer orders, the system calculates the invoice date by using the average number of days for order lines per customer to be invoiced. It then uses the invoice date as an input for the payment prediction functionality. The customer payment prediction functionality calculates a payment date for each order line.
The payment date for outstanding invoices is estimated from the payment predictions by picking a date that corresponds to fiftieth percentile of the cumulative distribution function that’s obtained from the predicted bucket’s probabilities.
The upper section of the Cash position tab includes a cash position chart. This chart shows cash inflows and outflows, and their impact on the total liquidity balance. The details in the cash position chart can be viewed in daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly periods. When you select Daily, you can view forecasts for the next 21 days. When you select Weekly, you can view forecasts for the next 20 weeks. When you select Monthly, you can view forecasts for the next 12 months. When you select Quarterly, you can view forecasts for the next 12 quarters. You can hide the chart if you require additional space on your screen to view content on the Cash position tab.
The lower section of the Cash position tab shows details for the position, cash flow, projected payments, and bank account.
- Information in the Position details grid is presented in three sections: a list of liquidity accounts, a list of documents that make up cash inflows, and a list of documents that make up cash outflows. The grid also shows cash position balances. For the first period that you’re viewing, the balance for the liquidity accounts is the opening balance. For subsequent periods, the balances for the liquidity accounts are calculated based on the addition of cash inflows and the subtraction of cash outflows from previous periods. To view details of the transactions that make up the balance, select the Balance link.
- The Cash flow grid shows cash inflows, cash outflows aggregated per period, and their impact on liquidity account balances. For the first period, the balance for the liquidity accounts is the opening balance. For subsequent periods, the balances for the liquidity accounts are calculated based on the addition of cash inflows and the subtraction of cash outflows from previous periods.
- The Projected bank balance grid show expected cash outflows and their impact on liquidity accounts.
- The Bank account grid shows the impact of expected cash inflows and outflows on the bank balance.
Details of the Cash position capability
The Cash position feature includes the following functionality.
- Cash position feature shows the cashflow based on existing documents in the system and cash inflow and outflow lines imported from external systems.
- Makes it easy to integrate cash flow data from external systems to Dynamics 365 Finance. Cash position can also use the data import-export framework. This framework makes it easy to integrate with Excel OData. You can also combine data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive cash position solution.
- Introduces intelligent cash position. Cash position is created based on customer’s payment behavior to predict when a company can expect cash to arrive in their accounts.
- For Customer orders and invoices, customer payment prediction AI functionality is used to determine the historical customer payment behavior when an order or invoice will be paid.
- For vendor orders and invoices, we use average time between shipping and invoice and paying an invoice per vendor to determine when a vendor order or invoice will be paid making cash outflows more accurate.
Details of the Cash flow forecasts capability
The Cash flow forecasts feature includes the following functionality:
- Introduces intelligent cash flow forecasting for long-term forecasting, using time series forecasting through automated integration with AI Builder.
- Lets you save specific cash flow position or forecasts, edit them, and then easily compare and measure the forecast performance to the actual financials.
- Enables what-if analysis through snapshot comparison. For example, you can create multiple snapshots that represent optimistic, pessimistic, and the most realistic views of your cash flow, and then compare and view the differences.
- Lets you view the cash flow forecast in multiple currencies, across legal entities, and filter and view cash flow related to a bank account.
- Lets you filter and view bank accounts that are related to financial dimensions.
The cash flow forecasting functionality in Dynamics 365 Finance will empower your organization to transform tedious, complex, yet repetitive cash flow projection to a simple, automated process. Automating the most tedious aspects of cash flow forecasting lets you focus on critical decision making to drive desired business outcomes.