A step-by-step view of Process Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance including how you can schedule for different times based on your needs and how to reduce manual journal creation.
In the usual world of Dynamics (AX 2009, 2012, even 365 Fin ops) to process payments for a vendor you would create a payment journal and then process the payment proposal.
However, to make it more intuitive and providing more automation capabilities, a new feature for Payment processing has been introduced: Process automation. This feature allows you to create a pre-defined scheduled with the combination of payment proposal criteria to be able to create payment journals, with less user intervention.
| Note: This feature is controlled by the feature management in PU35 and would have to be enabled once PU35 is installed. |
The first step with process automation – is to setup the schedule. This can be setup under Accounts Payable -> Setup -> Payment -> Process Automations.
You can start creating a process automation by clicking on “Create new process automation.” You can see the schedule type appearing as “Vendor Payment proposal."
The most interesting and advanced feature is that you can schedule this across companies (payment journals would be created in respective companies) without even changing the company as you would usually in the current day-to-day activities of using Dynamics 365 Finance.
And once you click on “Create series” you would be shown the options the way you may setup a batch job and you can define alerts as you may need to monitor the processing.
After you click on “Next” you would be presented with a similar form as what you might see in payment proposal, with options like: Amount limit, Include invoices from other companies (Centralized payments option), Delete negative payments etc.
The only option you may not be finding in this form is the 'From Date' and 'To Date' that you would find on the Payment proposal. This is replaced with a 'Define to date criteria' check box and the 'Number of days adjustment for to date.' The idea of scheduling this automation for payment processing is that this can automatically pick any payments that are due for a given day the job executes. If there is a need to pay invoices earlier than a due date, then you can mark the 'Define to date criteria 'and enter the number of days before due date you would want to pay the invoices in the 'Number of days adjustment for to date' column.
You can also set filters as you may do in normal payment proposal.
Finish the button and you can see your schedule is setup. Plus, on the right side you can see what the schedule looks like and also disable or edit as you need.
Once the job starts executing, you can see the view changing from Scheduled to Executing.
Once the execution is successful, you can see that there is a payment journal number generated in the same section as you see the status of the execution. You can also simply click on the view results to view the journals that might have been created.
In this case, the job has processed and created the below journal with all invoices that are having method of payment as 'Check.'
To summarize the feature of Process Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance:
- You can schedule your payments processing based on different criteria for different days/times of a day.
- This will reduce the manual journal creation that is usually done to process payments.
- You can monitor all the details in a dashboard view based on the schedule and view if there are any errors and resolve them.
