How many hours have you spent double and triple checking you’ve entered payment information correctly? Think of how many times you’ve had to apologise to vendors for payment delays due to inefficient approval processes.
Continia Payment Management is the ultimate solution for automating all your payment processes by seamlessly integrating your Business Central with your bank, and efficiently handling payments to vendors, customers and employees in a single workflow.
In this 30-minute webinar, hosted by Continia’s Michiel Eggens, a demo of the solution focusses on how Payment Management integrates with Business Central and how it enables you to confidently navigate your payments – ensuring safety and maximising efficiency.
Transcript
0:04
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today’s session.
0:08
Today’s topic will be covering of Continia’s payment management solution.
0:12
My name is Michael, and we are joined today by my co-host Michiel from Continia.
0:18
Before we get started with today’s webinar, just to let everyone know, I’ll be monitoring the chat.
0:24
So, if there are any questions that come up, please do feel free to put them into the chat.
0:29
I’ll bring them to Michiel’s attention as we get the opportunity if there are any questions that we don’t happen to cover on today’s session because we are with a 30-minute window today, obviously, we’ll be happy to follow up post session… with that said Michiel, I’m happy to hand over to yourself and we’ll carry on. Thank you so much.
0:51
Thank you, Michael, and thank you to TVision for having me today on this webinar. Yeah, like Michael said, my name is Michiel. Michiel Eggens.
1:01
I am based in the Netherlands and work for Continia. Some of you might know Continia already.
1:06
We’re an ISV and we create nice add-ons for Business Central.
1:11
Today will be all about payment management, the new solution for the United Kingdom.
1:17
And before we dive into Business Central, I would like to take you through the agenda of today.
1:23
So, as we are currently doing, we’re going through the agenda and the introduction. Today will all be about payment management, as I said.
1:34
So, I will first take you through a couple of slides two, to be exact, to show you what is the process on the payment side, as well as the bank account reconciliation side within payment management.
1:46
Of course, I will demonstrate this in a live demo, which is going to be a very quick demo.
1:52
I will not be able to cover all the features and functionality within the solution. Afterwards, we are going to summarise, and I have a nice offer for you.
2:03
And if we still have time left, we’re going to do a Q&A session where Michael will ask all of your questions that you put in the chat.
2:13
So yeah, let’s dive into the first slide to show you what is the payment management flow.
2:20
So, first of all, payment management is a solution that is integrated within your business central environment.
2:27
It allows you to submit vendor payments from one side.
2:31
And as you can see on the left-hand side of this slide, you have your incoming documents, whether it’s an invoice or a credit memo.
2:40
These purchase invoices can be paid, of course, where you do this in the payment journal.
2:49
And you see a couple of steps.
2:50
First of all, you do a payment suggestion.
2:52
And as you do the payment suggestion, payment management will validate all the data, all the data that is needed for the process to be, for the payment to be processed without any errors.
3:03
So, an extensive validation is taking place.
3:06
If you want, before sending the payments through to the bank, you can have the payments approved within the payment journal.
3:15
So, you set up a payment approval process for this.
3:19
It also covers the bank account verification, and the bank account verification is a feature where the system will prevent you from paying invoices to an unverified bank account, just as an extra security measure.
3:35
As soon as you are approving the payments, when using payment approval, afterwards they will be ready to export.
3:44
Once you export them, they will be sent through our CBIC, and this is visible here in the right-hand side, and the CBIC is our Continia Bank Integration Component, which is a platform that sure that all of the information is needed, and the information is secured and safely sent to the bank.
4:05
The bank receives your payment and after the payment has been processed and been paid you will receive a status file back; a status notification and I will show you of course inside Business Central what it looks like.
4:19
So, these status files they will be sent back via the CBIC, the Continia Bank Integration Component, back and come back to you in the payment journal.
4:29
So, you always have the latest status on your payment.
4:34
What you can also do, and we go back to the left-hand side, is for your outgoing documents, you can send email notifications to your vendors.
4:42
And I will explain this once we go into Business Central.
4:47
So, the payment flow is very easy, all to be handled from the payment journal and once you’ve done the payments you will also be able to import your bank account statement.
5:00
And this is the second slide and the last slide that I have for you today.
5:04
The bank account reconciliation flow, we work in the bank account reconciliation journal which is a standard journal within Business Central where we added a lot of the functionality.
5:16
Again, you import your bank statement through the CBIC through the Continia Bank Integration Component, and there you will have all your bank transactions ready for you to be reconciled to the open entries within your system.
5:31
So, these two slides were just to give you a brief overview of what the flow will look like when using Continia Payment Management.
5:40
Of course, I will demonstrate this now through the demo.
5:45
And like I said, I do not have the time to show you everything, but this demo will give you a good overview on the solution.
5:59
Just as document capture, our other solution and expense management and document output payment management is fully integrated within your business central.
6:08
And as you can see here in the role centre, this is where you find your payment activities.
6:15
Before we go into the payment journal to actually suggest some vendor payments, as well as paying the vendor payments, let’s go into the payment management setup.
6:28
When you want to use payment management, the assisted setup guide will take you through a few chapters to set up your bank accounts, to set up vendor payments and how you want to pay your vendors, as well as if you use the payment approval module, how do you want to work with the payment approval module?
6:48
Most of the time, payment management in terms of setup and implementation will only take half a day to maybe, depending on a lot of variables, to maybe one and a half days.
7:02
Assisted setup guides will take you through the whole process, and of course, TVision and ourselves as Continia, we will guide you and help you through, of course.
7:10
Afterwards, you can also do some manual setup here in the manual setup guide.
7:16
And what I want to point out now is that you can also send a payment notification, of course.
7:22
You can set this payment notification via the bank, and you can choose whether you want to use a very short payment notification template with only the company name, as you can see here on the right-hand side, or if you want to add more information when sending out the payments.
7:40
What you can also do with payment management is set up that you want to send an email notification.
7:45
So as an example, when you pay a vendor multiple invoices as a batch, then you would be able to use this email notification.
7:55
And this is where you set up all the fields and information that you would like to add to this payment notification, of course, with your company name and your company logo.
8:04
And when you send this batch payment to the vendor, it will automatically send this email saying, Dear vendor, we have now paid you a thousand pounds in regard to invoice one, two, three, four, five, six, just as an example.
8:22
So, if we then jump to a vendor card, this is also where you see that we have added some additional fields and functionality.
8:32
We’ll go into a vendor, take this one as an example.
8:39
And if we scroll down a little bit and look here in the payments section on the right-hand side, you can see the notification.
8:47
And this is where you fill in a email recipient or recipient email and you select whether you want to send a notification via the bank or if you want to send it via bank and email as well.
9:02
What else can be set up here?
9:04
If you want to summarise payments for this vendor automatically, you tick this box, and it will automatically summarise all the vendor payments for this vendor.
9:13
And down below, we also have a field called alternative vendor information where you can, when the vendor might have a very long name or with special characters that might give an error when sending a payment to the bank, you can give up an abbreviation of the vendor name here.
9:33
And once you do this, payment management will use this alternative vendor information, which will prevent you from having errors when you send the payments to this vendor, to the bank.
9:43
Like I said, there isn’t much time to dive into everything in regards to the payment management solution.
9:49
I would say we jump into the payment journal and suggest some vendor payments.
9:55
Of course, in the background, you can set up a lot of different variables depending on your payment processes. And as you can see here, we can now suggest vendor payments.
10:07
If I go to prepare and look at the payment journal setup before we suggest, this is where you can maybe pick this box and payment management will automatically search for any entries where you can apply for a payment discount.
10:20
Maybe you’ll get a 2% discount where you pay within 80 days.
10:25
If you tick this box, it will automatically apply those entries in payment suggestion as well.
10:31
What is also important to mention is the required posting status for the payments.
10:36
This now has been set by default to paid and this is also what we suggest.
10:41
We always advise to set it to paid because then you actually know the bank has, the money has left your bank and the bank has paid your payment. But you can also set it to sent or processing.
10:54
For now we will look 28 days ahead.
10:59
And if I now go back, click home and suggest the vendor payments, it will automatically pick up all the entries that are due within this 28 days.
11:12
In this demo system, we have six entries ready to be paid or six payment lines, I must say, ready to be paid.
11:19
And if I take this one and we go to the right-hand side, you can see the payment status, which is now ready for export.
11:26
And it will change over time once the bank has accepted it, it will change into processing or once the bank has paid the transaction, it will be set to paid and you can post them.
11:40
So, what else do we see here on the right-hand side?
11:43
Some details of the journal line, the bank details from the recipient.
11:48
And as I mentioned, this one has a status verified, which means that this bank account within your business cental environment has been verified.
11:57
If it’s an unverified bank account, where we have an example here in the bottom, you can either choose to, yeah, have it verified first by one of the employees that has the correct permissions for this, or you can say, I don’t want to submit the payment.
12:20
So, you can set up a hard stop where you don’t, where it doesn’t allow you to pay to this unverified bank account.
12:28
You also have the option that you can process the payment, but it will give you a warning.
12:34
In this case, I can now set it to the verification method.
12:39
Let’s say I pick up the phone, I call the vendor and I say, is this your bank account?
12:43
Yes, this is so the verified by my initials and now the bank account has been verified.
12:56
Of course, now I’m doing this, but you can also set up that another employee can do this so that you have a safe and secure way of sending payments to verified bank accounts only.
13:06
They now have the status valid, which means all the information needed to be exported to the bank is there.
13:15
And should you encounter an error, then you can see it here in the top or in the bottom right.
13:21
And we will try to convert these error messages into an easy to understand error message so that you would be able to directly amend it and send it to the bank. In this case, it’s one invoice that’s paid to this vendor.
13:35
But if I look at this payment line, it’s a combined payment of three invoices.
13:41
So, you can also see which invoices are within this payment line.
13:48
And if you use Document Capture and this purchase invoice has been previously approved within Document Capture, you can also see it here on the right-hand side. So now all the transactions are ready to be exported.
14:02
And once I click export and I would click on all lines because I want to send them all, it will start communicating with the bank.
14:11
And in the UK we work with an open banking provider that’s a company, a UK company called Yeppeli.
14:19
Yeppeli makes sure that the connection to your bank is enabled.
14:25
So, you will be sending your payments through Yeppeli to the bank.
14:29
And now you can see they have the status sent, which means they have left Business Central and are on their way to the bank.
14:38
As we update the status here in the top, in the ribbon, we can now see, and in the demo is going much faster than in real life, of course, that the bank has now accepted the payment.
14:51
So, the transactions have actually reached the bank.
14:54
They have accepted them.
14:56
But they are not yet paid, because they only will be paid once the due date is there.
15:01
And once I update the status again, it will have a new status paid.
15:08
Going back there into the right-hand side, clicking on the link here in the payment management status fact box, you can now see all the different statuses with a timestamp and also the user ID for the user that has been involved.
15:25
Payments have been done now.
15:26
The bank has paid them and we did set up on the payment journal set up that we could post them right, right now after they have the status paid, and now we have some posted payments within the system.
15:40
The next step is the bank account reconciliation, and the bank account reconciliation will allow you to import your statements directly from your bank also via Yeppeli, the secured way of importing them.
15:53
You don’t have to go into the bank environment, download your statement and upload it into Business Central anymore. Same goes for your payments.
16:01
The files are sent through the direct connection to your bank. So, no more downloads and uploads.
16:07
In this case, we want to start a new reconciliation where I first select the bank account that I want to import the statement for, in this case, the Barclays bank account.
16:22
And now you can see on the right-hand side appearing all the bank account ledger entries.
16:28
And now the only thing we have to do, and I’ll do it manually right now, but you can also run a job queue on this so that every day if you do your bank statement reconciliation on a daily basis, you can have payment management to import and maybe also reconcile your bank statements in the background.
16:46
For now, I will press import.
16:49
It will start importing and reconciling the entries that can be reconciled. And now this is what the bank account reconciliation looks like.
16:58
So again, on the right-hand side, we have the bank account ledger entries.
17:03
And on the left-hand side, we have the statement.
17:09
If we take a close look here, in the bank statement, we can see some different statuses, so the status okay means yeah, we don’t have to take any action because this line has been reconciled already.
17:23
We have some unsolved lines, and we have lines where payment management was able to find some information and based on this information automatically created journal lines in the cash receipt journal or the general journal.
17:38
What we first do is we handle the unsolved lines. So, let’s do this first one.
17:46
This is a vendor payment, and this vendor payment didn’t match. Why didn’t this vendor payment match?
17:54
Because the transaction date differs from the posting date here on the right-hand side.
18:01
So, I set my mouse here as well and look at both lines.
18:05
This is the 29th of May, and this the 30th of May and payment management looks at amount but it also looks at the date if one of those criteria doesn’t match then it’s a mismatch and in this case we can now go to matching and say I want to match this line manually.
18:23
For the next time this issue will occur you can set up a tolerance date one day before one day after if we would have set up this tolerance date and this one would have matched automatically.
18:37
The next unsolved line is a customer payment.
18:41
You can always check behind those hyperlinks here in the additional information, if there is any information that you can use to match.
18:49
In this case, we can see a document number.
18:52
But what is more important is that we have a number of reconciliation suggestions here in this column.
18:58
You can see it.
18:59
And I can open this by clicking on the hyperlink as well.
19:03
And now, what the screen tells me is that payment management found a document number.
19:12
The document number was in the additional information.
19:14
And based on this document number, it allocated this to this customer. Why didn’t it match?
19:21
Because you can see the statement line amount and the amount, yeah, differs. There’s a difference of £15.
19:28
So, this customer applied for a payment discount.
19:33
If we click OK, we will create a journal line in the cash receipt journal and after we solve the unsolved lines here, we can go into the cash receipt journals as well.
19:45
Now this is a bit of a strange example where we don’t have any information here, we don’t have a reconciliation suggestion, so we have to do a bit of research on this one.
19:55
We can that an amount of £10,000 has been transferred and maybe there’s been an urgent transfer that has been done directly from your bank.
20:08
So, what we can then do is we can set this one to manual handling and create a journal line.
20:17
And later on, when we go into the journals, we can process this.
20:24
Now, the last unsolved line, again, we can see here, this is a customer payment as well.
20:32
And again, we can see a one here in the number of reconciliation suggestions.
20:37
I again click on it, and we can see that payment management based on the document number allocated this one to this customer number.
20:45
And why didn’t it match?
20:47
Because the amount also differs from the statement line amount.
20:50
So, this is maybe a rounding difference.
20:53
So again, for this one, you could also set up like a tolerance, you can do this per vendor.
20:59
So, if we would have set up a tolerance for this vendor, then payment management would have been able to automatically match this line.
21:08
But now we can just click on OK.
21:10
And like with the previous example, a journal line is now created for our handling here in the cash receipt and in the general journal. So now we’ve handled the unsolved lines.
21:26
Before we go into the journals, we can also see a payment from headquarters here.
21:34
And if we look into the additional information, we can see that two invoice numbers have been provided by headquarters for this payment. It was a combined payment.
21:46
When we go into the cash receipt journal, we will, I click on the hyperlink here on the right hand side, we will see, it will notify me on the differences and the differences here, the rounding difference as well as the payment discount and also here you can see this payment from headquarters again and this is the summarised line and based on the two invoice number that were provided, payment management was able to automatically allocate these to two different customer numbers for you.
22:23
So we’ll go into the journals, do a check.
22:27
Is everything OK?
22:29
And do we want to post them like this?
22:31
And if that is the case, we click on post and post these cash receipt journal lines as well.
22:39
And now, almost done.
22:43
It’s only the three general journal lines that we still have to handle.
22:48
But maybe before we go into the general journal lines, let’s see how payment management can be enhanced, how the matching can be enhanced.
22:56
And this is mostly done by setting up reconciliation rules.
23:03
Starting here in the top left, you can set up general reconciliation rules.
23:08
And in this demo, we’ve set some examples on how to handle bank fees or interest.
23:14
And as you can this is where you set up a search text and a search principle.
23:19
If payment management sees bank fees on the statement, it will automatically, based on the rules that I give in here, apply those lines to a GL account number, which is now the same for positive and negative, but you can also set up different GLs for positive and negative, of course.
23:39
So, you would be able to set up general reconciliation rules, but you could also do this for a bank account, so bank account specific reconciliation rules, or maybe customer rules.
23:53
If a customer likes to send information with the payments, but always provides his company name, in this case, you can set up the company name as a search text.
24:03
If document capture, if payment management finds this information, it will automatically apply it to this and the correct customer.
24:15
So, you can do the same for vendors and if you pay your employees from payment management as well, you can do the same for employee payments as well.
24:23
So, these rules, as you go along, will make your bank account reconciliation process more and more efficient.
24:32
So, now, the last three lines that we need to handle before we close and post the bank account statement are those waiting for us in the general journal.
24:43
And this is where we find the bank fee and the bank interest, which have, based on the set of rules that we set up and just looked at, applied it to this GL account number.
24:54
And this is where we also see the £10,000 that was transferred from the bank.
25:00
And you can determine what do you want to do with this transaction.
25:06
So, in this case, oh, in this case, you can set up a GL account or you can post it to a bank account or however you prefer.
25:15
For this demo, I will use the same GL code because it has direct posting.
25:21
Now we did a final check, and this is basically when we are done and say, I also want to post these general journal lines.
25:31
Once we’ve posted those lines and going back into the statement, we can now see all lines have been reconciled.
25:37
They all have the status okay, which means that we are now done and ready to post and finish off this statement.
25:48
For now, I will post it.
25:50
And once we post it, it will be saved under the bank account, of course.
25:54
Do I want to open it?
25:57
Yes, let’s have a look so you can see the starting and the ending balance, of course, and all information is still here.
26:05
So, you can still open up the additional information here from the statement.
26:10
So, you will always be able to check and see your bank account statements under your bank account.
26:19
And now we’ve run through the whole process.
26:22
So, we’ve submitted some vendor payments via the payment journal.
26:25
We did some bank account reconciliation for one of the statements, posted the statements.
26:31
And this is in a nutshell what payment management is able to do for you.
26:38
I see we have four minutes still left within this webinar.
26:44
So, if we go back, let’s summarise.
26:51
So, what did we just see and why should you use payment management?
26:54
I think first of all, it’s important to mention that it’s a very safe and a secure way of handling your payments.
27:04
It eases your tasks around payments, and it makes sure that all your details from the bank are up to date within your business central environment.
27:14
So, you have time to spend on more exciting tasks, of course.
27:21
And for all of you that are now attending this webinar, I would like to know more.
27:27
I would like to invite you if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
27:32
If you want to know more or do some maybe a deep dive into the solution, please get in touch with your contact at TVision and we would be able to together set up a demo for you and your colleagues, of course.
27:48
So, today’s special offer, before I give back the word to Michael, today’s special offer for you as the webinar attendees is as soon as you sign up for payment management before August 1st, then we will give you three months off of your subscription.
28:07
Michael, thank you very much, back to you, do we have any questions?
28:13
There was, funnily enough, that you finished off on the promotion there, so the one question that’s come through is around the subscription and how you guys cost and price up your solution.
28:28
Okay.
28:30
Let’s see.
28:33
Let’s open up our website and I would invite you to go to our website, Continia.com, where you can calculate the price.
28:42
So, the same as for document capture, expense management, our cloud pricing is consumption-based where we would be able to see the payment management calculation here. So, you determine which of the feature modules do I want to use.
29:03
Important to mention is that direct communication is a mandatory feature module, so you will always need to tick this box because it allows you to set up the connection to your bank.
29:14
We have an IBAN lookup, which allows you to update the vendor Bank Account Details within Business Central by looking into a global database.
29:22
We have a service provider module where for some service providers, we allow to upload the service provider, the payment service provider files and automatically match all the transactions to the sales invoices.
29:35
Direct debit, we don’t have it yet available for the UK, but it will come very soon.
29:40
And we also have the payment approval module.
29:43
So, let’s just stick to the direct communication one for this demo or for this webinar, and then you would need to fill in how many transactions do you have.
29:51
So basically, how many entries, both customer and vendor ledger entries that are handled through payment management.
29:59
Let’s say if you have a thousand transactions, then your monthly price will be £220.
30:08
And again, I would strongly recommend going into our website and start playing with this once you have all the information.
30:19
Thank you very much, Michiel.
30:21
So yeah, with that, we’ve reached the end of the session.
30:24
Thank you very much, everybody, for attending today’s webinar.
30:28
If you are interested in learning anything further, feel free to reach out to myself for your account manager and we will be happy to kind of progress things.
30:38
And if that’s all from yourself, Michiel, that’s all from me.
30:42
So, thank you very much.
30:43
We’ll see you soon.
30:45
Take care.
30:46
Thank you.
30:47
Thank you.
30:48
Bye bye.