Payment of Accounts Payable invoices from the Practice using Available Funds

Creating payments for accounts payable

You may create payments for accounts payable invoices:

• centrally from the practice
• through a job

From the practice you can create payments across multiple jobs and multiple suppliers in one process.
Note

A payment entry once created needs to be subsequently printed or output.

Through a job, you can pay multiple invoices across multiple suppliers at one time.

You can filter the accounts payable register to select invoices for payment based age and the available funds:

Payment Selection Tools

The invoices shown in the register will be based on the currently applied filters:

• Practice,
• Job,
• Supplier, and
• Date From (Date due) etc.  

The options are as follows:

<All invoices due for payment>

Select all AP entries where the "Pay invoice on date" field of the AP is less than or equal to the current date.

<All invoices >= n days

Select all invoices where the invoice date of the invoice is greater than or equal to the specified number of days.

<Pay from any available job bank account with funds>

Select this option to allocate monies in any of a job’s other bank accounts with funds in the selection.  If this is unticked, which is the default, only funds in the default bank account will be utilised.  NB: When the accounts payable are being paid through the practice trust account. The system will use the total balance of the trust account, not the individual job's funds held within the trust account.

<Uncleared funds>

Use the bank account ledger balance, excluding any unposted payments, in the available funds calculation. 

If you also want to take into account unposted receipts into account, then tick the ‘Inc. unposted receipts’ checkbox.

<Cleared funds>

Use only the reconciled bank account balance when calculating available funds

<Apply overdraft limits>

Ticking this option will take any bank overdraft limits into account when calculating available funds.  Overdraft expiry dates are taken into account which this checkbox is selected.

Once you have selected the required options, click “Select Invoices for payment based on Available funds”.  The system will then calculate which invoices can be paid based on the chosen criteria.

A progress bar will be shown in the centre of the screen.  Once that has completed, the invoices which agree with the selection criteria will be selected and have the amount and bank details entered.  The total number of invoices is displayed in the ‘Selected for payment’ tab:

The selection criteria or the selected AP entries may be changed at this point.  If the selection criteria are changed and the ‘Select invoices …’ button is clicked again, you will be asked to confirm that the previously selected invoices will be removed.

To clear the selected invoices, click on the ‘Selected for payment’ tab and select ‘Clear List’.

You should note that the number of rows shown in the register will not change once the “select invoices for payment …” button is clicked: only rows where it is possible to make a payment against supplier invoices will have a value entered in the ‘Pay Now’ column.

Credit notes will be selected where

• there is an associated invoice which can also be paid, or
• there are non-associated invoices, but the value of payments exceed the value of any credit notes (i.e.: There is a net payment due to the supplier).

Single credit notes will not be selected for payment (which would amount to a ‘negative payment’ which is not permitted by the system).

Invoice selection methodology

The system will select the oldest outstanding invoice first and if funds are available, select it for payment, deduct the allocated amount from available funds and proceed to the next AP and repeat the process until either no more AP’s are available for selection, or no further funds are available. 

Part payments of invoices are not automatically calculated but, once the automatic selection has been made, manual amendments can be made.

This enhancement should make it a lot easier to select invoices for payment based on what funds are available, rather than the previous manual selection method which could fail subsequent validation due in most cases to a lack of funds.

If the default bank account is configured in the Job, then the AP displays in the AP register as follows.  The account is displayed but you still have to tick the invoice for payment.

The Paid from account only applies to invoicing from the PO register or invoice payment through the AP register.  The make supplier payment function cannot cater for this as you may pay multiple invoices from one account only and, although make supplier payment can still be used, it will not enforce the paid from account selected in the invoice.

See a related article on credit notes:

How do you link a credit note directly to an invoice

Validation

Apart from the available funds validation mentioned previously, all AP register validation now has a separate column which displays the validation icon.

If the user mouse overs the validation icon, the validation error message will be displayed in a blue popup.  For example, in the screenshot below the old EFT validation where AP’s were greyed out where EFT details were entered now has an icon next to each supplier without EFT.

The same validation paradigm is applied wherever an action is performed and something fails the validation test.

Once you have selected invoices to pay across various jobs and click Pay Now you will be required to request authorisation of the payment, if you have electronic authorisation turned on.

The Authorisation notification lists the authorisers for all jobs paying an invoice. The payment request will be sent only to the authoriser in the job.

Once you have sent the authorisation email you will get a summary of the total invoices amounts being paid out of each job.

A batch is created in each job, Batches - Pending Authorisation and the authorisation and payment process continues as normal.