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Guidance on Managing Vendor Payments and Disbursement Reporting in Business Central

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Posted on by umer786 102

Hello BC Community,

We are in the process of implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) for our organization in the shipping industry. We act on behalf of a parent company based outside of Australia, managing vendor payments and reporting on disbursements.

Currently, we rely on spreadsheets for daily disbursement reporting, comparing budgeted versus actual figures. To streamline this process, we aim to leverage BC's out-of-the-box functionalities for managing advance payments, adjustments, and reporting.

Key Requirements:

  • Daily reporting on disbursements, with visibility into budgeted vs. actual figures for bringing ships to Australia ( port fees, docking fees etc.)
  • Ability to track and adjust for discrepancies when final vendor invoices are received (e.g., due to variations in actual costs).

Business Case Example:

  • We receive an estimated advance disbursement of 100K from an agent.
  • We remit 90% of this advance (90K) to the vendor immediately.
  • After about 2 weeks, we receive the actual vendor invoice, which can vary by +/-10% from the estimate.
  • We need to adjust the recorded disbursement to reflect the actual invoice amount.

Potential Approaches in BC:

  1. Purchase Orders (PO), Budgeting, and Advance Payments:
    Utilizing BC’s PO and budgeting features to record estimated disbursements, manage advance payments, and adjust for discrepancies upon receipt of actual invoices.

  2. Jobs Module:
    Leveraging the Jobs module to track disbursements by project (each shipment movent as one project), providing the ability to compare and adjust budgeted versus actual figures for accurate reporting.

We are seeking advice on the best solutioning approach to implement this in BC, particularly:

  • How to record and track advance payments (e.g., 90K against an estimated 100K).
  • How to handle adjustments when the actual invoice amount differs from the estimate.
  • Recommendations for daily reporting on budgeted versus actual disbursements.

Your insights and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your expertise!

Categories:
Dynamics 365 Business Central
  • Suggested answer
    YUN ZHU Profile Picture
    YUN ZHU 77,254 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    Guidance on Managing Vendor Payments and Disbursement Reporting in Business Central
    Are you using the Job module just to track your budget?
    Personally, I think this will increase the workload of the user's operating system. Can it be replaced by a general Budget module?
     
    Hope this helps as well.
    Thanks.
    ZHU
  • Suggested answer
    Valentin Castravet Profile Picture
    Valentin Castravet 25,794 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    Guidance on Managing Vendor Payments and Disbursement Reporting in Business Central
    If you want to keep things simple, you can use purchase orders with the prepayments functionality. This allows you to handle 'advance payments' efficiently. Additionally, the system records the expected cost of an item when it is received and updates it to the actual cost when the item is invoiced, which is another functionality mentioned that you require. 
     
    There is more information on prepayments here - Set up prepayments - Business Central | Microsoft Learn
     
  • gdrenteria Profile Picture
    gdrenteria 13,918 Most Valuable Professional on at
    Guidance on Managing Vendor Payments and Disbursement Reporting in Business Central
  • Suggested answer
    Khushbu Rajvi. Profile Picture
    Khushbu Rajvi. 8,151 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    Guidance on Managing Vendor Payments and Disbursement Reporting in Business Central

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