Set up the payment journal

To get the most out of the payment journal, you can set up how you want Payment Management to create the payment suggestions. The first time you use a payment journal that has Payment Management enabled, you will be asked to set up a few things. These settings form the basis of the vendor payment suggestions in the payment journal.

• To setup the payment journal, navigate to the relevant Payment Management-enabled payment journal, and then in the action bar, select Prepare > Payment Journal Setup.

Now, we'll take a look at some of the key points in the setup.

General

In this section, you define the general settings for the payment journal.

The Use Balance Account Setup setting is enabled by default and ensures that if a balance account hasn't been applied on the payments or on the payment journal, the balance account setup and the payment currency determine which balance account will be applied to the payment.

The setting Required Posting Status specifies the status that a line should have, before you can post it. We recommend that you set it to Paid to ensure that you only post payments that have been processed and paid in the bank. In this way, you avoid having to make any reposting.

In the Last Due Date Calculation field, you can specify the time frame for the payments that you want to include in the payment suggestions. For example, if you enter 14D in the field, you'll include all payments with a due date earlier than 14 days from today's date.

Posting Date Setup

In this section, you can define which posting dates should be added to the payment lines. You can set up a fixed calculation in the Posting Date Calculation field, or you can set it up to Find Payment Discounts to ensure that you include all possible discounts.

Summarize Payments Setup

In the payment journal, you can summarize payment lines with the same vendor and thereby just send one summarized payment line to the bank. This can be an advantage if, for example, the bank charges a fee per payment line.

If you want to summarize payment lines, there are a few things in the Summarize Payments Setup that you need to take into account, for example, if you want to exclude credit memos, or allow a deviation in due date or cash discount date. If you allow for a deviation in due dates you can summarize payments even though the due date is not the same.

You can also choose to ignore if payments have a different balance account number, creditor number, payment method code, or recipient bank account. If you do this, the information from the vendor card will be used instead.

Approval Setup

If you've set up payment approval for the payment journal, you can tweak elements of the approval workflow under the Approval Setup FastTab.

• You can change the field restriction that specifies which fields will be locked for editing during the approval process and the export of payments.
• You can change the amount (LCY) up to which you can export the payments to the bank without approval.

If there are other settings you'd like to change for the approval workflow, you'll need to run the Setup Approval Workflow assisted setup guide for the specific payment journal again.

Now, you are ready to make a payment suggestion in the next unit.