Transcript
Introductions
0:01
Hello, and welcome. Thank you everyone, for attending today, our webinar on Procure to Pay. Just before we start the webinar, just a few housekeeping rules. Attendees will be on mute and will remain for the whole webinar. Please use the question box to ask any questions related to the topic, and all questions will be answered after the demo. If we run out of time, or if your question requires a longer answer then the question, will be answered offline directly. Please use the chat box for questions related to the webinar, such as if you can’t hear the audio if the presenter is going too fast. But, please note, the link to view the webinar recording will be sent to all the attendees after the demo.
0:43
This is our monthly webinar on key areas of NAV and Business Central. You can sign up for as many as you like on our website. I’ll show you the list of upcoming webinars at the end of the session. We also send out regular e-mails to register for the next one.
1:00
My name is Tiziana, also known as Deetz and I will be facilitating the Demo Today. I’m an Account Manager here at TVision, and I’ve worked in TVision for three years and my background is 18 years of IT sales, marketing and partner management. Ian will be doing the demo today, and he is a Senior Support Consultant at TVision. Ian has been working at TVision for five years and has been using NAV since 2000.
1:26
Now, in this webinar, we will take an in-depth look at the Procure to Pay process in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. We will advise you on how you can use this system to help you streamline your procurement process and reduce the errors often caused by manual matching.
1:44
We will also provide practical tips on how to use the procure to pay process more effectively. One of these being the popular Auto Suggest feature for payment.
1:55
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the Procure to Pay process has never been easier. By using it you will have a single integrated system where the same document can be followed for the entire process and accessed by everyone involved.
2:11
These are the top five things we’re going to show you today about Procure to Pay. One, Complete solution. Business Central is a complete ERP system and it includes all the elements in your procure to pay process.
2:24
We are also going to talk about the planning worksheet also known as MRP (material requirement planning), Purchase credits, purchase orders, purchase receipts, purchase invoices, payment journals and much more.
2:40
Flexibility. So, we will show you how flexible this can be. You can pick and choose the elements of the process that you need, and you can turn the feature on and off. Your Business Central processes can match the real-world process procedures. For example, you can choose whether to start with a purchase order or just capture an invoice.
2:59
Integration. Business Central is fully integrated. So, while you’re doing your purchasing, you’re also controlling your stock, bank ledgers and creditors ledgers.
3:09
Ian will be running through an example of the process and you will see inventory update and a vendor balance changing.
3:18
Reducing errors. You will see that you can have a single document and you can follow through the entire process and take away the need for manual matching permanently. Every other person involved in the person will be looking at the same document.
3:33
Efficiency. So, you have this the complete solution that’s integrated. It has removed your errors, and you won’t need to worry about manual matching and reconciliation, and now you can use the Auto Suggest Payment option, and trust that it will be correct.
3:50
So, before the demo, we’d like to do a quick poll, and the question is, do you think you’re making use of the full capabilities of this process?
4:01
I’m just going to launch the poll. OK, so just give me a few seconds.
4:14
A Yes, we use everything, and it works. B We were using some of it, but would be nice to use more. C I didn’t even realise it could have of the whole process, or D we handle our procurement outside Business Central.
4:31
Some answers are coming through. Excellent. Thanks for that. OK, interesting, most of your selected option, B and C. I’ll just close the poll.
4:55
So now I’ll hand over to Ian for the demo who’s going to show and tell you more about the process. Please feel free to ask any questions during the webinar, and we’ll answer as many as we can after the demo.
5:05
Over to you, Ian.
The demo
5:07
Thanks, Deetz Hi guys, what I’m going to be going through today, I’m using Business Central, the latest version. I’ve not added any extensions or anything. So, this is out of the box.
5:21
A lot of us were using Business Central. But we’re not using all the capabilities that are there and when Deetz asked me if we can do a Procure to Pay webinar I said “oh fantastic” because there’s loads of stuff in there and I sent her away to do some research and see what other people talk about.
5:42
I was shocked that other systems and other partners, they talk about capturing invoices, paying vendors. And that’s all they mention where the Procure to Pay Process is so rich inside of Business Central and NAV. It handles everything from planning your purchasing all the way through.
6:01
I was actually quite shocked, so I’m going to spend a bit of time on this stuff that other people don’t speak about and a bit less time on this stuff that you’re more familiar with. If I go too fast, please give Deetz a shout, and she’ll tell me to slow down.
6:17
Right, so I’ve got this standard system. Yeah, and you can imagine your sales team, I’ve got this company, I buy and sell furniture. My Sales team, they’re capturing orders. I need to know that I’m going to have enough stock on end to meet all these orders that my sales team are capturing. I’m sure that’s something that you can relate to with your business. So, let’s just have a look at some of my items.
6:44
I’m going to choose one item in particular that I’ve prepared an example for obviously. So, looking at my Athens disk, I can see I’ve got four pieces in stock. But if I drill down on it, I can go and look at my inventory and my history, et cetera. But much more interesting, if you come down a little bit, you might notice, you’ve got this replenishment tab.
7:10
Quite often people ignore this because you’re not using everything in the system. But I fill this in and I say that this is something that I purchase if I need to replenish my stock and it has a lead time of two days. So, I place an order It takes two days for the stock to arrive. I usually buy it from a vendor number 30,000.
7:32
Um, I can put in some more information than if it’s something I produce, but we’re worried about purchasing today. And a little further down this planning How do I want to do my planning for this item? I’m choosing a maximum quantity option.
7:47
That is a fixed re-order quantity option an order or a lot by lot options. Maximum quantity is the one that’s going to work for me. I’m going to give myself a safety lead time of one week, so that’s going to add to that two days.
8:02
You saw just now, I’m going to say, when the stock gets below 10, I want to re-order, I want to try and get my maximum inventory up to 40 pieces. I have to order, at least four pieces, it’s in multiples of four, because that’s how many are on a pallet. The maximum order that anybody should be placing is 40.
8:25
So, a little bit later, all of this information is going to be used by my purchasing system to help me make some decisions.
8:34
So, we can see I’ve got this item here. I could have looked at my item’s availability by period, and I would see that at some point in the future I’m going to go into negative inventory for this because I’ve got quite a few orders stacked up for next month and the month after. I’m going to have to order some. Now I could item by item go down this list and say, “Oh, show me what’s my inventory look like going forward?” But that’s going to be a bit of a mission if I’ve got thousands of items.
9:04
So of course, there’s an inbuilt tool that helps me with this. So, I’m going to search for planning. And there are quite a few options here for planning. Now you will notice, order planning, and planning worksheets come out at the top of my list now. This is something you only really use with manufacturing and Advanced Warehousing for these two options. You need a premium license, which is the most expensive Business Central license to get to these two options.
9:38
But you also get requisition worksheets. This is standard for everybody. So, you do have this on your system on Business Central and within NAV, it’s also available there if you’re still using NAV. Requisition worksheets that are identical to planning worksheets, it’s just the planning worksheets will plan production and warehouse movements. Requisition worksheets just plan your purchasing side of things.
10:03
So, I’m going to click on it, and it gives me this Planning Worksheet. One of the options up here is to calculate a purchasing plan. So, I’m going to ask it to calculate a plan just for the remainder of this year. I can include a forecast, if I want to. I didn’t set one up. I’m going to ask it to respect those parameters that I set up on the item master. I’m not going to put in any filters, I’m going to say, OK, I’m going to let my system go away and come up with a plan.
10:34
So, for this item, the Athens desk, it needs me to place two orders. It wants me to order 36 units right now. Now, you remember, I’ve got four in stock. 36 will take me up to the 40 that I want to keep my maximum inventory.
10:51
And, it’s also saying that at some point in the future, by the first of the month, my stock could have dropped enough that I need to order another 40 units to get my stock back up to where it should be. So, it’s looked at the demand that’s already on my system, and it’s suggesting these are the things that you should be ordering here. So, this is quite a powerful tool, you can imagine, if you have hundreds of items, hundreds of customers, you get a really long list to do manually, would take you an entire day.
11:23
Business Central can do this for you in minutes. And it gives you these suggestions. You can choose to accept these suggestions or you can turn off the ticks if you don’t like them, you can tweak them. If you wanted to say not order 40 or something, you can edit these numbers. I’m just going to accept these numbers. I’m going to say Process.
11:45
I’m going to carry out the messages, and I don’t want to print any orders, I just want you to create them. And it’s gone. It’s created purchase orders for me based on what was in my planning worksheet. So, I’m going to go and look at my purchase orders.
12:08
I should have, at the bottom of the list, supply number 3000, I’ve got an order there. Remember, he was preferred supplier for the Athens desk. One order with two lines for 36 pieces and 40 pieces with different requested delivery dates.
12:31
Based on the parameters that I put in there. You can see the difference between the planned and the expected. That’s that safety lead time that I spoke about. It wants to take cognizance of that as well.
12:49
So, it can prepare the purchase order for me without me having to do this manually and figure it out myself. I’m sure for most of you you’ve used the system. This is where you start you come into purchase orders and you start capturing purchase orders.
13:04
You don’t have to start here. You can stop one step back from this. You can let the system suggests the purchase orders for you, and create them for you. You could if you really wanted to get there a different way as well, you can go through Purchase quotes.
13:21
And let’s just have a look at purchase quotes. I’ve put a couple on the system just so you can see what they are. So, my boss said, yeah, we need some chairs. Please get some quotes. I’ll choose the best one. So, I went out, I got three quotes for chairs. So, the first quote was from Fabrikam for10 chairs. They’ll give me a 2.5% discount, that’s how much it is. For. the next one was also from Fabrikam but they’ve got a bit of a special deal going and they gave me a quote that if I buy 15 chairs, they’ll give me 3.5% discount and that is how much it is. And the other supplier he offered me a strange deal: these 10 chairs that are really good price, but only if I’m buying eight of these other chairs for £25. Now I can give these to my boss.
14:13
I can let him look at them and he can choose which one wants to go with. Or, I could send all three for approval. He could approve one of them and reject two of them. When the one that’s the best option is chosen, let’s say it’s the first one. It’s either been approved, or my boss says, yep, this one. Ian, go for it!
14:35
I can say process, turn this into an order. And the system will convert it from a quote into a purchase order. Do I want to open that purchase order? Yes, I do. And, there’s the purchase order waiting for any other bits of information, delivery dates, locations, et cetera. That’s another way of getting purchase orders onto my system.
15:01
I could also have some integration with a CAD package that sends through orders, or a website that sends purchase orders. So, there’s lots of ways of getting purchase orders onto your system.
15:13
Once you’ve got purchase orders onto your system, what happens next? So, let’s go and have a look at one of these purchase orders. So, once we’ve got a purchase order on the system, everybody who’s using Business Central or NAV, they would come to this exact same place, and they would work from exactly the same document. So, whether I’m the buyer who wants to see what’s still outstanding.
15:39
If I’m the guy in the receiving store who needs to receive the goods or if I’m in finance and I need to invoice the goods, this is where I come. We all look at the same document. So, let’s look at this one for the tables. If I want to receipt, these goods, I can say I want to receipt. How many? I don’t receipt those ones. I only want receipt the ones up top. And I can choose do I want to invoice them at the same time or do I want to leave the invoicing until later? Maybe someone else is responsible for that.
16:19
I’m sure you know how this works. I post this document. It creates a purchase receipt. It creates a purchase invoice and then that’s the document is ready for my accounts payable team to pay to the vendor. If I only receive and somebody else does the invoicing, they would come here, they would type in their number and they would be looking at the same thing on Business Central.
16:49
We don’t have to go to three different places. Everybody’s working on the same source document. Once documents are posted, you can go to a posted document. You can go back, you can see how it’s affected your stock. You can go and see how it’s affected your general ledger, how it’s affected your VAT. How it’s affected your vendors’ balances. It’s all integrated. It all works together. Everybody’s talking the same thing. It just makes life really convenient, really easy.
17:22
And it’s more than just capturing an invoice because somebody sent me an invoice. I can now capture an invoice based on a receipt that was based on an order that was based on either a quote or on a purchasing plan, and at any step, during that process, or in every step during that process, depending what I choose, we can turn on approvals and say, well, somebody needs to approve it before it moves on to the next step.
17:51
Or, depending on how your business is set up, maybe you don’t need approvals. You can just let them move to the next step, based on the people working and doing their jobs properly. Once you have captured all of this, you’ve still got vendors to pay because this is a procure to pay process.
18:11
So, how do you pay your vendors? Now, I’m sure most of you are aware of this, but I will just show it in case. So, you would go to the payment journal.
18:23
Um, and you can have multiple payment journals set up in your system. I’ve got one specifically for Ian and you can see, I was testing earlier on, let me just delete everything that’s in here.
18:40
So, I’ve got a blank document. I can manually type this out and say these are the vendors that I want to pay.
18:47
But again, because I’ve captured everything within Business Central I don’t need to. I have the ability to, go to my Prepare, Suggest Vendor Payments. The system is going to look through all of my vendors based on those purchase invoices that were posted.
19:06
It’s going to look at the due dates of those documents and it’s going to suggest these other vendors I think you should pay. So, I’ve put in the parameters for when I want to run this, I just want to get a grand total for each vendor. I don’t get a separate line for every invoice, I have the document number, I can filter, if I wish. I’m just kind of take everything and say, yup.
19:29
So, it’s suggesting that I should pay these five vendors this amount of money. Again, I can choose to delete one of these lines if I don’t want to pay Nod Publishers for some reason, I can delete this line. I don’t have to pay them. And I can round with some of these numbers of maybe I pay £450 here instead of having the odd number, because I just like my bank account to look neat, maybe.
19:56
And no, running on the off chance that they gave me the £2.93 is a bit of a discount. Maybe I’m being a little bit sly, I think, network. But I’m not forced to take these numbers. Once I’m happy with this, I can post it. It’s updated my bank account, it’s updated my vendors balances.
20:16
My inventory is being updated every step of the way, and the following week, the following month, the following quarter, whenever it is, my planning team, my purchasing team, they can come onto the system and they can go back to the purchase requisition worksheet to see what next is the system suggesting that I buy.
20:37
So, I went through a lot there but you don’t have to use all of that. You, probably, not using everything at the moment, should probably just capturing purchase orders, maybe purchase invoices and doing that in journals.
20:55
You can pick and choose which elements you want to use. You can pick and choose how much detail you want to go into. You can pick and choose whether to put on approvals, or not. So, it’s a very flexible system.
21:07
But it just makes your life so much easier, that everything’s in one place, everything’s linked to everything else. Everything’s updated at once, and you can trust that everything is accurate. So, that’s what I wanted to speak about today.
21:21
The entire system from planning your procurement all the way through to paying your vendors in one place, and it all just works to get. Now, Deetz, did any questions come in?
21:35
Not yet. So, if anybody has any questions, if you can submit them now, just in the question box, that would be great. We’ll just give you a few seconds.
Q&A session
21:48
So, I was just wondering, actually, while we’re waiting for some, some questions, and you didn’t talk about reporting. Does it help your reporting all make it more accurate? Of course, it does Deetz.
22:00
So, because we’ve got everything, a whole system, all your reporting is coming from one system. So, if you’re doing an account schedule on your GL and maybe using a Jet Report, a Power BI Report. Maybe you’ve got some custom-made reports using a SQL Server or something. It’s one source of information that everybody’s using, so everybody’s getting exactly the same number.
22:23
The planning guys, the finance guys, the sales guys, they’ve all got the same details on their reports, and if you’re using dimensions against your items, against your vendors, you’ve got that element of accuracy as well. That you can split up your reports.
22:38
It makes life really easy, Especially for reporting. We do have a question that’s come in. We’re a services company, and we don’t really buy and sell goods. Can we use this for my office purchases. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.
22:55
Yeah, so obviously, you can still buy your stationery, your office supplies, paper for the printer, etcetera. Instead of buying an item that you’d be buying against the GL account, you can do that. Obviously, the planning worksheets don’t work for that, that’s based on the goods that you buy and sell as your normal trading stock.
23:17
But you can still use the purchase quotes, purchase orders, purchase invoices, purchase returns, purchase credit memos, and the payment journals that would suggest vendor payment all of those normal office supplies.
23:31
And there’s nothing that stops you. I have seen one client putting their stationery as inventory items, that they can issue them.
23:41
And buy them using them as items with zero value rather than using them as GL purchases. It’s something worth thinking about, a bit of work to set up. And it may be an expense that’s not worth doing, but it’s just, you know, something that is possible with a system.
23:59
Excellent. Well, thank you. And if you guys have any other questions, you can think about, please do feel free to message us later, and we’ll get back to you.
Five key takeaways
24:11
So, we actually use some key takeaways, which hopefully will help you.
24:17
The Business Central processes that now that you know how it handles the entire process, Which steps in the process fit in with your business model and your needs? And how would you like to implement them? And how would you want them to work for you.
24:33
They are your real-world processes. Do you really need to your existing processes? Perhaps they exist because I’m an old accounting system and maybe you can streamline and use Business Central’s built-in functionality.
24:47
Approvals process. Ian only touched on this briefly, but you can also integrate your procurement and payment processes with Business Central’s built-in approval processes, and workflows from improved control.
25:00
When setting up your systems, it’s important to decide how and where the approvals should be applied.
25:08
The Full Monty. While I was researching about this topic Ian pointed out that almost every other solution just talks about invoicing and payment.
25:15
Business Central is a full ERP solution, and you can manage every step of the process from ordering and receiving through to the final payment.
25:24
The final thought, please do remember that this is all included in your current solution, and you don’t have to pay any extra for this functionality. You can see any efficiencies or improvements that you get by embracing this full functionality. If you’d like help on how to implement any of these processes, please, do get in touch.
Close
25:47
We hope you found this webinar interesting and informative. We shall be sending out an e-mail soon to register for the next one, and we’ll also put a reminder about the webinar in our newsletter.
25:59
Again, thank you for attending the webinar, once I close this session, a survey will appear to be very grateful if you could respond with some feedback.
26:06
And if you have any further questions, please feel free to e-mail them to me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk.
26:13
Thank you very much.
26:15
Cheers guys.
