Collections is challenging, particularly in the midst of a business downturn. When interest rates rise, some businesses turn to an alternative lending source: their vendors. Stretching payments from 10 days to 45 days provides additional cashflow and reduces the need to borrow. Since most vendors (in our experience) don’t enforce interest charges against customers, other methods of payment reduce collections time.
Business Central: SEPA Direct Debit
Let’s assume for the time being that your bank supports SEPA Direct Debit (most large banks do). With an agreement from your customer and a bit of configuration in Business Central, you can create a SEPA file to send to your bank. Once you upload the file, it transfers funds from your customer’s account to yours as if the customer paid you by ACH. ACH is also supported in Business Central.
As you can see from the setup above, Business Central supports valid dates and single (as well as recurring) payments. When invoicing, you can select the invoices you want to collect with Direct Debit.
Business Central Payments
Direct Debit isn’t for every customer situation. So if you accept credit cards, you can automate collection with a payment service. PayPal is a common payment service used by many individuals and small businesses. After you enable the Paypal Payment Service, you select a payment service on the invoice. You could have several Payment Services, depending on the availability of extensions to Business Central Payments
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The Invoice Details section of the Posted Sales Invoice is below with PayPal selected as the payment service. When you email an invoice to a customer, Business Central generates a link to collect payment. As you see below, the email also contains a PDF copy of the invoice as an attachment.
If you are using Exchange Online (Office 365 email), you can configure the email sending program to use either a single email account for this type of email, or use the email account of the user sending the email from Business Central.
If you’d like more information about Business Central Payments or need support for Business Central, give us a shout at Data Guidance Group here.