How to reduce the effort of receiving customer payments in Business Central

If you love doing fiddly, complicated and time-consuming tasks that demand accuracy then this isn’t the blog for you. If on the other hand you like making things easier, simpler and more efficient then read on!

A major chore for anyone working in a receivables department is the necessity to match customer payments against open invoices. There are many potential complications. A payment may not indicate the reason for the payment; it may represent a partial payment; it may be a lump-sum payment for several invoices; or it may involve a discount. These factors combined with a high volume of payments can be a significant headache.

Fortunately, Business Central includes functionality to simplify this task. The payment processing tool included in Business Central is called payment registration which provides the facility to easily apply payments that have been made into your bank account to the associated sales document and then to update the ledgers with the value of the payment.

When using payment registration for the first time you will be required to complete a set-up page that will be used each time you utilise the tool.

The Register Customer Payments page lists all open invoices for all customers and can be filtered by customer to simplify the identification of appropriate invoices.

The Register Customer Payments page provides the following functionalities:

• Apply a customer payment to one invoice - the simplest scenario is to register a single customer payment against a single invoice.
• Apply a customer payment to multiple invoices - a more complex scenario is to register a single customer payment against multiple sales documents.
• Allow discount – an action on the page allows the discount details for an invoice line to be accessed.
• Identify documents that are not fully invoiced – in some cases a payment may be received that is associated with a document that cannot be found.

The Register Customer Payments page can be accessed from the Tell me what you want to do search action but can also be accessed from the Register Customer Payments action on the Customer Card page. When accessed from the Customer Card page the data is automatically filtered for the selected customer.

I hope that this article encourages you to try out the payment registration functionality in Business Central or to explore it more fully.