25 December 2023

ERP Systems: Microsoft Dynamics 365's Vendor Invoices Processing (Setup Areas)

ERP Systems

Invoices can be set up to be imported automatically in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operation (D365 F&O) via Invoice Capture (see process). Besides the Invoice Capture-related set up, there are several areas related to Vendor invoice's processing:

General Ledger

Accounts for automatic transactions need to be defined at least for the 'Vendor invoice rounding off' and 'Rounding variance', respectively for the 'Exchange rate gain' and 'Exchange rate loss', if this wasn't done already.

To facilitate accounts' reconciliation and reporting, one can enable a Batch transfer rule for the Source document type 'Vendor invoice' and thus one journal is used for each Vendor invoice. This also makes sure that the Description from Invoice will be taken over in the Journal, which facilitates accounts' reconciliation.

Subscription Billing

In case one needs to defer the amounts over a time interval (e.g. x months), as it's the case for prepayments, the integration with Subscription Billing on the Vendor side in F&O seems to work with minimal configuration. A Billing schedule is created for each Invoice distribution and can be modified or cancelled after the Invoice is posted, if needed.

If your organization uses Subscription Billing also for Accounts Receivables (AR), one might need to compromise on the setup because the same parameters are used for both modules. 

In what concerns accounts' reconciliation, there seems to be a 1:1 mapping between the Schedule line and the General Ledger (GL) posting, a table with the mapping between the records being available. One can build thus a Paginated report to display the mapping between AP and GL, if the infrastructure is in place (e.g. by building a data lakehouse/warehouse based on F&O, see post). 

Fixed Assets

One can enable the creation of Fixed assets by checking the "Create asset during product receipt or invoice posting" radio button in Fixed assets parameters.

The feature "create the fixed asset automatically during the time of invoice import" for PO-based Invoices (with "Create Fixed Asset" flag set at line level) doesn't seem to be supported yet.

Vendor Invoice Journals

Before Invoice Capture, Vendor invoice journals were helpful for posting summarized cost invoices that are not associated with POs (e.g. expenses for supplies or services). One can still use this approach, however if the line-based details are important, then it makes sense to use Pending vendor invoice with Service items or Procurement categories.  

A single Vendor invoice is created as one Vendor invoice journal. 

Organization Administration

When using workflows, setting the same language for all LEs can reduce the amount of redundant information maintained in the workflow(s), otherwise the texts need to be provided for each language. 

Default descriptions can be enabled for Purchase orders' invoice ledger and vendor to carry the same description entered Pending Vendor Invoices in Invoices and Journals. The functionality works also for Cost invoices.

Ideally, Invoice's description should have been maintained in Invoice capture and/or Microsoft should have provided a default description also for it. 

System

Unless there's a requirement to post manually the journals from subledger to GL, a batch transfer for subledger journals must be created for each LE.

One can enable email notifications for the users participating in workflows and use workflow delegations for the intervals the respective users are on leave. 

All users participating in the workflow must be available also as active employees. It makes sense to do latest when the integration goes Live. Moreover, the Users need to have the appropriate permissions for the roles they have in the process.

Vendor Invoice Automation

There's further functionality available under the 'Vendor Invoice Automation' label (see [1], [2]), though the following are the most important ones: 

  • Automatically apply prepayments to vendor invoices
  • Automatically submit imported invoices to the workflow system.
  • Match product receipts to pending vendor invoice lines.

Recurring Vendor Invoice Templates

Microsoft introduced with 10.0.38 PU a new feature called 'Vendor invoice templates', which allows creating recurring vendor invoices without the need to enter all the vendor invoice information for each separate invoice (see [3]). There seems to be no information available whether any integration between this feature and Invoice Capture will be supported.

E-Invoicing

EU countries need to enforce the Directive 2014/55/EU for Vendor and Customer invoices. The directive requires that the electronic exchange of invoice documents between suppliers and buyers to occur over government-held third-party solutions. Each country has its own system(s) and regulations with different scope and timelines. Some countries have already requirements for 2024, respectively 2025 and there are similar projects in US and other countries. 

Even if Microsoft started this year (2023) to provide country-specific integrations for e-Invoicing, for the moment there seem no information available on how e-Invoicing will integrate with Invoice Capture.

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Resources:
[1] Microsoft Learn (2023) Vendor Invoice Automation (link)
[2]Microsoft Dynamics 365 (2023) The Future of Finance: Unlocking the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation (link)
[3] Hylke Britstra (2023) Recurring vendor invoice templates (link)
[4] Dan Edwards (2023) AP Automation at DynamicsCon (link)

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