Watch the Credit Control Notepad webinar recording by clicking on the play button below.
0:00
Thank you for attending everybody. Just a few housekeeping rules before we start. Everybody will remain on mute for the whole webinar. If you do have a question or a inquiry about anything, please use the question box. All questions regarding the actual demo and the content will all start after the demo, but feel free to put them in as we go. If the answer does require something a little bit longer, we will answer that directly offline afterwards. Please note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent to all attendees after the demo.
0:38
OK, so this is a 26th in a series of monthly webinars on key areas of NAV and Business Central. You can sign up for as many as you like on our website, but I’ll show you a list of the upcoming webinars at the end of the session. So my name is Karen. I’m going to be facilitating the demo today. I’m an Account Manager here at TVision. I’ve worked here for nearly three years and my background is 20 years in software account management experience for ERP companies, and it’s going to be doing the demo today. And he’s a Support Consultant here at TVision. And he’s been working here for nearly four years and has been using NAV since 2000.
1:13
So this webinar is going to be about TVisions Credit control Notepad, add on, and how it helps to enhance your credit control processes. Whilst there is a level of credit control within Standard NAV and Business Central, such as the age debt report, what’s missing is the ability to put in notes and assign tasks against invoice or customers. And this means that you may not be able to know exactly who is chasing which clients, about what and the action that should be taken and whose responsibility is. So that’s where TVision’s Credit Control Notepad comes in. It also provides you with a dashboard, which means that a credit controller can have a specialised view with the required tasks, status, and helpful analysis all on their welcome screen. So these are the top five things that we’re going to discuss about the credit control notepad today.
2:04
So firstly, what is standard in Business Central? Secondly, we’re going to show you the additional functionality which is in TVision’s Credit Control Notepad. So, these are the areas such as payment history, trends, outstanding issues, credits, notes, and tasks, which also includes Promise payments. Then, we’re going to talk about all the best ways of using it are. How it interfaces with the role centre. And, finally, how you can actually get your hands on it.
2:28
OK, so just before we actually do the demo, I’d like to launch a poll just to find out how difficult you currently find meeting your KPIs for debtor days. I’m going to launch the poll now. And if you wouldn’t mind putting in your answer, that’ll be great. OK, I’m just going to collect a few responses just to see what the answers are.
3:04
OK, so at the moment it seems a bit of a split between: we don’t always meet our KPIs, but we have all the information, and we don’t always meet our KPIs, and we don’t have all the information, OK. No problems at all. So now I’m going to hand over to Ian to do the demo.
3:28
OK, Karen. Can you see my screen? Yes, I can. OK, excellent. Hi, guys. Thanks for joining today. I’m doing the demonstration today on Business Central SaaS. What I’m showing you also works on Business Central, on premise. And also, on versions of NAV, after 20 13 has similar functionality, but some of the bells and whistles you need the later versions of NAV for them to work.
4:08
The first thing that you’ll notice, I’ve logged onto my system here as a credit controller. So that’s the first thing that we offer, is a new rule centre called credit controller, which has information relevant to your credit control department. So, immediately, you can see all of my actions, and my menus are related to credit control, looking at customers, bank accounts, cash receipts, sales invoices, etc.
4:33
Up at the top here, you will notice that you have two different ways of looking at your customers. The customers standard list. This is what you will be used to if you are using a standard uncustomised version of Business Central or NAV, you see your customers, you can see the balance for that customer, and the balance due for that customer. But that’s pretty much all that it shows you. It doesn’t tell you if there are overdue payments, or anything like that.
5:06
So, what we have done, we have added another way to look at the customers with aging included. So I’m seeing the same customers again, I can see their balance but now I’m seeing the balance broken up into the aging bends. So just at a glance immediately, I can see that School of Fine Art, they seem to be a little bit behind on their payments, they’ve gone into the 60 to 89 days column for something. This is an interactive list, so I can actually click on that number and it will drill through the system and it will bring back the invoice or invoices that are overdue.
5:51
So I can quickly navigate and see what’s on that invoice, or if there’s anything that looks a little odd. You’ll notice there’s also a column that says All Actions with numbers in, this is the number of interactions we’ve had with the Customer from the Credit Control department. We’ll have a look at that again in a short, while, once we create an interaction.
6:19
On the home screen, you’ll notice there’s some new tiles. So we have an activities, My actions, and this is showing me any to-do’s with a customer relating to credit control that I need to follow up and I can see I have two to-do’s that I need to be following up on. And again, it’s interactive. I can click on this and it brings me through into those to-do’s so that I can have a look at them.
6:42
And we also have an agreed payments section. So, this is where we have spoken to a customer, and they have confirmed that they’re going to pay some money over. And, again, we can drill down and we can see for which customers, which invoices have they agreed to pay. And we also get a little KPI over here, which talks about our debtors days. So, most credit control departments have some KPI where they need to keep their debtors days below 30 or something like that. Mine’s currently show me 60. So my company’s not doing too fantastic. And again, I can drill through and it will show me those payment histories, so I can see where it came with those numbers.
7:27
Also, my Home screen I have a list of my customers. So these are the customers that I’m responsible for, not every customer for the company. And again, I can see my customers. I can see their balance. It is broken down into aging bands and this list of customers, it’s fully customisable. So I can manage this list. I can add new customers, take customers off, and it becomes my list of customers. My colleagues, they would have a different list of customers.
8:00
I get my key performance indicators over here. So at the moment, it’s showing me a cash cycle chart. So I can hover over any of these things, it will highlight the lining question. And I can see my payments, they’re starting to tick up over here in the past month. And again, this is a customisable chart, if I’m not happy with this chart, I could look at a different view of the information. So now I’m looking at my total receivables per month as we head into the future.
8:36
I also have my report inbox if I have any reports that are waiting for me. And if I had timesheets to do, I’d be seeing my timesheets down here as well.
8:45
So how does the functionality that we offer apart from having a nice, friendly, looking screen that gives some extra information? We have the ability to record interactions with our customers. So we noticed, a few moments ago, that we’ve got one customer who’s looking like they’re falling behind on payments – The School of Fine Art. Let’s go and have a look at this customer. And you’ll notice, when I click on this customer, the view of the customer has slightly changed. So on standard Business Central or NAV you would still see this Header information, you’d still see the address and communication tags, but also straightaway I can see all open transactions against this customer. I can see this invoice, that’s overdue. I can scan down this list, and I can see that there are no payments, that’s still waiting for application. So I do know that this invoice is still outstanding.
9:50
I can see that in the past, I have interacted with this customer twice, either by e-mail or by phone. I can click on that and read those interactions. But let’s say I’ve looked at this outstanding amount, a little bit worried, and I’m going to give Alpine Ski House a phone call, sorry, school of fine art, a phone call just to make sure that everything’s OK.
10:15
I would create a new customer action. It takes me through a wizard on contacting the School of Fine Art. I can specify which person at the school of fine art I actually speak to or spoke to. In this case there’s only one, so I’m going to speak to Megan. And I’ll just fill in a few details about this phone call I’m having with Megan from School of Fine Art. It’s a normal priority at the moment. I put in a quick description. A call to Megan, I hope I spelled that right. It’s outbound Initiated by us, I’m making a phone call, I could be sending an e-mail or a letter.
11:00
And if this is just a quick phone call and Megan said, yep, everything’s fine. They’ve just done a bit of an office move. That’s why the payments delayed. I might you know, close this while I’m logging it. And I still get the option to put in some notes here and, you know, Megan talked about Office move. A little bit of an explanation as to why the payment is late and I finish.
11:36
It’s got the interaction here. Now, I can see some details about when I was speaking to who, when it was modified, the notes that I made. I’ve only got one line on this interaction because I opened it and closed it in the same step. I can always go back and edit that note to put in a few more details if I want. And if there’s a particular document that we discussed, I can attach that document to this interaction, so that the next time I come and look, I can see, oh, that’s what we spoke about.
12:09
So, this is a very quick and simple interaction with this customer. And when I come back to the customer called, I can now see there are three interactions recorded against the School of Fine Art. I can click on that, I can look at those interactions. Any one of them, I can open up, and, again, I’m back there, I can see the details of this interaction. So, I’ve spoken to Megan, and you’ll notice at the moment, I have two open actions.
12:48
A few weeks have passed, and we still haven’t received payments for this invoice. I’m going to speak to Megan again. So I will go back to that customer and I can record, once again, a new interaction with that customer. Or I can even come down and I can choose it’s this invoice I want to speak to her about. So I’m just going to make sure I’ve highlighted this line, and I am going to create an action based on this actual invoice. It will bring me through to have the same wizard again. I can recall that I’m speaking to Meagan in particular. And this time I’ve got a few more options here. It’s not just a general conversation anymore.
13:44
This time I’ve really hassled Megan and she’s agreed that she will make payment by the end of the week, for example. So I’m turning this one it into an agreed payment interaction. I can change the priority and make it a high priority interaction. It’s put in the description for me that it got from that invoice itself, the 69368 is in there. Again, it’s a phone call. I’m not going to close this interaction until I actually receive this payment. So I’m putting next, I put it in the story, make it an agreed, etc. And, I finish now, I’ve created the interaction but I have left it open. So, you’ll notice there’s no closing line here. And there’s the actual invoice that we spoke about that’s been attached to this interaction.
14:44
So, Megan’s promised she’s going to pay by the end of the week and now, every time I log onto my system, I can now see I have an extra activity that I need to be aware of. And one of those activities is a high priority. I can click on these tiles. I can go and re-open up those interactions just to review what’s happened. And you’ll notice that my agreed payments have increased.
15:13
I can click through on that and see what these agrees payments are. There’s one from Ian. There’s this one from Meghan. If Megan makes payment this afternoon, I can come in, I can go to this interaction. I can close it so that it will disappear from my titles. But you can imagine, I might have a lot of these interactions with a big, long list down here. So what I can also do, at the end of the week, I can go and process, and I can ask the system to go and look through any of these invoices that are referenced in any of these promised payments. It will go and check, and see if they have been paid, and the payment has been applied to the invoice. it will automatically close all of these tickets for me that have been paid.
16:12
I do get the option to close them manually myself, but I can let the system do that automatic update for me. The nice thing about this, if I go to that erm agreed payments, I can download this into Excel. So if my Financial director is perhaps asking me: 2How much money are we going to collect this month Ian?” I can go and look at my customers debt in total, or maybe the aged debtors report, and say, Yeah, 80% of what’s current we should collect by the end of the month, plus all of these things that customers have promised to pay for chasing up overdue payments.
16:56
So I’m confident when I give him the information, I’ve actually got some numbers to back it up, and he can be confident that the information I’m giving him is not just something that I’ve sucked out of my thumb. I’ve actually got promises from customers that they are going to pay this money.
17:15
All of this functionality, it does not have any impact on what you already have. So if you were to carry on doing things the old-fashioned way, and, you know, six people in your organisation use the credit control notepad but want to do it the old way, you can still carry on doing things the old way. If you have any customised reports, maybe using jet reports, or Power BI to give you information about your current debtors situation, those reports will continue working they’re not going to be affected by this functionality at all. And the nice thing is we have built this functionality based on what our clients have told us they would like to see. So this is pretty bespoke for the UK market.
18:06
These are the kinds of things that credit comptrollers within the UK are expected to keep track of, and we’ve tried to put them in one easy place to just make life simpler, quicker, and more efficient for credit controllers. That’s pretty much what I have for the demo today. Karen, I don’t know have you got any questions coming through?
18:30
Yes, I have. So the first one is says: If you interact with a customer by e-mail, can you save the e-mail into actions rather than having to go back into Outlook to view the sent e-mail? OK, that’s a very good question. Off the top of my head, I’m not 100% sure. So I will have to ask someone who knows a little more than me and whoever’s asking that question, Karen, if you can just let me know, I’ll send them an e-mail with a full answer. Sure.
19:11
There’s another one saying, Can you create an interaction that covers two invoices? Yes, you can. So, when we created that invoice against one, sorry, we created the interaction against one invoice, and it gave us…. Let’s just open it up. So we did have the interaction details here. And now, because I’m doing it live, it’s decided to go slow. And we’ve got at the bottom, the invoice that this is related to, I can always add a new invoice, a second invoice, or a credit note. So for 2 or 3 documents that go together, we can add them and put them on the same interaction.
19:54
Anything else Karen? Yep, I’ve got another one saying: We have had a filter added, is there are two credit controllers in the team, and we deal with different services that go across the same customer. Can we use this filter to show the invoice customer relevant to each of us? That would be a slight tweak, so as I said, on your homepage, you can select which customers you want to see in your list. If you go and look at the standard list, you see all the customers, so you can still help your colleague out if they’re on leave, but that’s the only filter you choosing which customers you want to see. Or if you’re the Credit Control manager, you can actually assign to your credit controllers, which customers they see. It doesn’t necessarily filter down which transactions on that customer a credit controller sees, but we could tweak the system if that’s something that you really need.
20:54
Just got one more. Can you have multiple debtor ledges on here that show separately? Multiple debtor ledgers? So if they have the different companies with their own ledgers? OK, so if you have different companies, I’m just logged into one company here, I can go up, I can log into one of my other companies, and I can have a different list of favourites on that company. So I would see, for company A the customers that I’m responsible for, for Company B, I would have a different list of customers that I’m responsible for. So I think that’s a yes. But if that’s not quite what you’re asking, please let me know, and I will give more details.
21:38
OK, no problems. So I’m just going to go back now to the presentation. If you do think of any other questions, feel free to drop us a line, I’ll give you the e-mail afterwards. To let you know that this is an add-on from TVision and it’s available for all versions of NAV and Business Central. However, there are some additional areas that we’ve added for versions 2016 onwards. So just to make you aware of that, OK, I’m just gonna go back, change myself back to the presenter. Hang on a second. OK, Ian can you see my screen? I can. Wonderful.
22:27
OK, so we’d like to leave you with some key takeaways about the credit control notepad. So to start with, you know, before you kind of look into this a little bit further. Have a look at what’s standard in Business Central is that enough? And if not, you know, it’s probably worthwhile making a list of the areas that are lacking and to see if the credit control notepad can actually help.
22:59
Second of all, credit control notepad it is designed to help you achieve your targets for revenue collection and data days, by spending less time on getting the payments and more time in the analysis. You can look into average data days in more detail, and understand the areas of improvement. East, as each interaction is locked, it does make it a lot easier to share tasks. So, if you are working as part of a team, you can easily see the progress that’s been made. So you don’t have to rely on e-mails from other people to get an update.
23:30
And, of course, the information is central on the system, so, you know, hopefully by using the credit control notepad, you no longer have information on different spreadsheets with different versions, all on different peoples PCs and networks and things. You have one central place where you know the information is correct. And as I just mentioned, some features are only available for version 2016 onwards, such as promised payments, for example. So if you are on an older version of NAV, and credit control is a major area within your business, you may want to consider upgrading to the latest version of Business Central on premise, or moving on to Business Central Software-as-a-Service.
24:08
OK, so, we hope you found this Credot Control Notepad webinar interesting formative. As I mentioned, this is the 26th in a series of webinars, and we’ll be sending out e-mails soon to register for the next one, but we’ll also put a reminder about the webinars in the newsletter as well.
24:22
So, thank you for attending today’s Credit Control Notepad webinar. When I close this session, a survey will appear. It would be great if you could respond with any feedback. But if you do have any further questions, feel free to e-mail them to me at Marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk Thanks very much. Thank you.
Other past webinars here
