Understanding Configuration Options for Vendor Invoice Automation in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Posted on: November 21, 2022 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365

Accounts Payable is an essential part of business, including to ensure timely payment for goods and services and to maintain quality relationships with suppliers and partners. However, Accounts Payable can also be time-consuming, cumbersome, inefficient, and susceptible to error. Automating vendor invoicing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 can ease stress on individuals by ensuring that invoicing is executed efficiently and accurately, but it is imperative that the process is set up correctly.

This blog details setup options available when configuring your vendor invoice automation settings. This help you understand the features available and enhance visibility into invoicing processes.

What types of setup options are available with invoice automation features?

• Parameters for automatically applying prepayments in imported invoices.
• Parameters for submitting imported vendor invoices to the workflow system and matching posted product receipt lines to pending vendor invoice lines.
• Parameters for processing automation background tasks. The process automation framework is used to submit imported vendor invoices to the workflow system. It’s also used to automatically match posted product receipt lines to pending vendor invoice lines and to perform invoice matching validation for manual invoices that were automatically matched to product receipt lines. Different business processes use this framework to define how often the selected process is run. The available frequencies for the Match product receipt to invoice lines and Submit vendor invoices to workflow background processes include Hour and Daily.

To set up or view information about a background task, go to System administration > Setup > Process automations, and select the Background task tab.

To achieve touchless automation from the import process through vendor invoice posting, you must set up a Vendor invoice workflow. Set up a workflow by going to Accounts payable > Setup > Accounts payable workflows. To ensure that the invoice can be processed from start to finish without manual intervention, you must include an automated posting task in your workflow configuration.

Parameters for automatically applying prepayments in imported invoices

• Automatically apply prepayment for imported invoices – When this option is set to Yes, the system automatically looks up existing prepayments for a corresponding purchase order when vendor invoices are imported. If any prepayments that can be applied are found, one additional line is added to apply the prepayments in the vendor invoices that are being imported.
• Block follow-up automation process in case of prepayment application failure – When this option is set to Yes, invoices will be blocked if a prepayment can’t be applied. Like other automated processes, such as the receipt matching process and the submission to a workflow process, the invoice automation process won’t pick up blocked invoices until the prepayment is manually applied.

Parameters for submitting imported vendor invoices to the workflow system

Specific parameters are used to submit imported vendor invoices to the workflow system. Additionally, some parameters are used to match posted product receipt lines to pending vendor invoice lines. On the Vendor invoice automation tab of the Accounts payable parameters page, the parameters that you must set are divided between the following sections:

• Vendor invoices workflow
• Match product receipts automatically

The following parameters are available:

• Automatically submit imported invoices to workflow – If you set this option to Yes, imported invoices are automatically submitted to the workflow system. If this option is set to No, invoices must be manually submitted. By setting this option to Yes, you enable a touchless process from the import results through posting.You can set this option to Yes only if an active vendor invoice workflow is set up for your legal entity. To set up a workflow, go to Accounts payable > Setup > Accounts payable workflow.
• Match product receipts to invoice lines prior to automatically submitting – If you set this option to Yes, the imported invoice can’t automatically be submitted to the workflow system until the matched product receipt quantity equals the invoice quantity. By setting this option to Yes, you enable automatic matching of posted product receipts to invoice lines that a three-way matching policy is defined for. That process will run until the matched product receipt quantity equals the invoice quantity. At that point, the invoice is automatically submitted to the workflow system.The Match product receipts to invoice lines prior to automatically submitting option is available only if the Enable invoice matching validation option is selected. When this option is selected, the Automatically match product receipts to invoice lines option is automatically selected.
• Require the calculated totals to equal the imported totals for automatic workflow submission – If you set this option to Yes, the invoice can’t automatically be submitted to the workflow system until the totals that are calculated for the invoice equal the imported totals. If this option is set to No, the invoice can automatically be submitted to the workflow system, but it can’t be posted until the calculated totals are corrected so that they match the imported totals. If you don’t import the invoice amount or the sales tax amount, this option should be set to No.
• Automatically match product receipts to invoice lines – If you set this option to Yes, background processing can be used to do automatic matching of posted product receipts to invoice lines that a three-way matching policy is defined for. That process will run until the matched product receipt quantity equals the invoice quantity, or until the value of the Number of times to attempt automatic matching field is reached. The process can be run until the invoice has been submitted to the workflow system.This option is available only if the Enable invoice matching validation option is selected.If you set the Match product receipts to invoice lines prior to automatically matching option to Yes, this option can’t be set to No. To set this option to No, you must first set the Match product receipts to invoice lines prior to automatically matching option to No.
• Number of times to attempt automatic matching – Select the number of times that the system should try to match product receipts to an invoice line before it concludes that the process failed. When the specified number of attempts is reached, the invoice is removed from automation processing.

Next Steps

---

---