Vendor Payment Forwarding From Parent to Child

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Hello,

Currently many of our suppliers carry multiple brands, which have different terms of payment. For each supplier, we created a vendor account representing each brand they carry, such that each supplier/brand combination is treated as a separate vendor within AX (2012 R2). This complicates things for a number of reasons, but the focus of this post is to find a way to reduce the burden this places on our Accts Payable team, as we’re currently making multiple payments to each supplier (one payment for every AX vendor/brand that the supplier carries). As suggested in this post addressing a similar problem, we’re considering creating “parent vendors” to represent each supplier that we actually pay, and then creating a payment method whereby that parent vendor pays for their respective “child vendors” . We would then make one single, actual payment to the “parent” vendor, the supplier itself.

Is this a decent solution? Is there a simpler way to approach this while maintaining the different terms of payment within each supplier?

If this solution seems reasonable, how does one make a single payment proposal that will cover all of a parent’s children at once (rather than making various individual payments from parent to child)? Can we simply filter by payment method (assuming we set up payment methods for each parent)?

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi,

If all 'child vendors' have the same 'parent vendor' assigned in the invoice vendor field you can create a single payment run to pay all of the invoices.

Note: Assigning the parent vendor in the invoice vendor field will creat open vendor positions at the parent vendor level, not the child vendor level. Carefully double check this before making such a change.

Best regards,

Ludwig

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Thank you for your reply, Dr Reinhard!

Are you referring to the invoice account field in the Vendors form, or the payment proposal page's "Vendor Account - from: / to" fields: If you're referring to the Vendor form (configuration), my understanding is that by setting the invoice account to the parent, the parent's terms of payment will override the various terms of payment assigned to each child, which we need to retain for each purchase order. Is this correct?

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello M_z_B,

Yes, I am referring to the invoice account field in the vendor form.

To my knowledge the payment terms of the child will be used.

I double checked that in a demo R3Cu13 system.

Can you double check that in your system version?

Best regards,

Ludwig

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Crispin John Augustine 37,081 on at

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Your idea "....make one single, actual payment to the “parent” vendor...." sounds good.

I developed a very similar function, where invoices for all vendors that are members of a "Conglomerate" will be paid by the parent.

1. We added an additional field at Vendor for this.

2. For each Vendor with this new field (not empty), invoices (documents) were never generated when posting..

3. A weekly Job would then pick all posted invoices for all vendors belonging to a parent, print a consolidated invoice totals document, and different pages (each page(s) for different child vendors invoice summary, payment Terms, Discounts, etc..)

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Thank you Ludwig and Crispin for your thoughtful replies

Regarding your suggestion, Ludwig, it's possible that some customizations are disrupting standard AX functionality with invoice accounts (we're using 2012 R2). Initially, I tried exactly as you mention, testing how invoice accounts impacted terms of payment of purchase orders. Unfortunately, when using the parent as the invoice account and creating a purchase order using the child's vendor account, the purchase order header shows the parent's terms of payment, while the purchase order lines seem to default to (and revert back to) terms that are yet different from both the parent and child's.

This behavior, especially in light of your suggestion, seems pretty irregular. If we're unable to sort out the invoice account field conflict, do you recommend proceeding with the payment method strategy? Is it possible to make simultaneous payments to different vendors that share the parent payment method?

Crispin, your function sounds very similar to what we're envisioning! Can I ask why you elected to add the additional field under the vendor? Does it seem feasible to proceed with the payment method process I outlined instead of customizing with an added Vendor field?

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello Matt,

It is difficult to say whether another adjustment that has been made prevents the standard functionality from working as expected or whether this is a system bug in AX2012R2.

Probably have a quick look at LCS if you can find a hotfix for that.

If you cannot find a fix on LCS and if you can replicate the same behavior in a different test/demo system then making a system modification might be the fastest and easiest possibility to progess.

Best regards,

Ludwig

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Crispin John Augustine 37,081 on at

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Our reason was, the parent that pays the invoice is not a vendor.

We had a Special statistical Analysis built on vendors, and didn't want to disturb this Code. So we decided not to treat the parent as a Vendor (thereby no invoice account, and a new field)

Another reason was to prevent users to order directly from the parent.

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