About Payments and Collections

Tip: We recommend you to use Payment Plus for all your payment activities in FFA.

The Payments tab allows you to perform the following tasks:

• Select the type of payment process – payments to vendors or collections from customers.
• Select the vendors that you want to pay, or the customers you want to collect from.
• [Optional] Refine your selection at account In this context, accounts are organizations or people that you conduct business with, such as customers or vendors. Account is a standard Salesforce object. FinancialForce accounts can be any Account Record Type. or transaction A record created when documents are posted to the general ledger. Transactions must balance (sum to zero) in home, dual, and document currency. level, including making part payments.
• Number your checks, if relevant.
• Post and match the payment proposal List of the accounts and transactions you are planning to pay or collect subscriptions from, on a specified date, using a specified bank account..
• Send remittances to your vendors.
• Cancel one, selected or all checks and electronic payments on a proposal.
• Clear a payment's history

The Payments tab displays a home page that lets you quickly create and locate your payment proposals. The Payments object is a company-owned object . New payment proposals are assigned to the company queue A location within the underlying Salesforce platform used to represent a company. When you activate a new company, a corresponding company queue is created. that represents your current company The company in which you are working. This is represented by the company queue to which you, and new instances of objects you create, are assigned..

Stages of the Payment process

A payment proposal can pass through several stages. Some stages are optional.

Stage	Available buttons	Pay statuses	Transaction line status at end of stage
Retrieve (Retrieve Accounts)	Retrieve Accounts, Cancel	Retrieving, Retrieved, Error	Available
Refine (Exclude Accounts/Transactions, Part Payments)	Save, Pay, Discard	Retrieved, Discarded, Error	Available
Save (Create)	Pay, Discard	Selecting, Selected, Discarded, Error	Proposed
Refine (Exclude Accounts/Transactions, Part Payments)	Save, Pay, Discard	Selected, Discarded, Error	Proposed
Pay (Post/Match)	Discard, Resubmit	Selected, Background Posting, Matched, Discarded, Error	Matched
Cancel	Cancel Selected, Cancel All	Canceling, Part Canceled, Canceled	Available
Clear History	Clear History

Check payments have an additional stage, Check Numbering. See Confirming Check Numbers for more details.

The Retrieve stage may involve the use of an asynchronous batch job. The Save, Pay and Cancel stages do use batch jobs.

To monitor the progress of an asynchronous batch job, navigate to Setup, then click Monitoring | Apex Jobs. The queue lists any batch jobs that have not finished execution. The Total Batches column lists the total number of batches for the job. The Batches Processed column lists the number of batches that have been processed. See the Salesforce Help for more information.

Warning:

Do not change the current company while a batch job is being processed. The only time you can switch companies while a batch job is running is if you have System Administrator permissions and the related batch job is included on the Disable Select Company Validation List custom setting. See Accounting Settings for more details.

Contact FinancialForce Customer Support for more advice. See Contacting Customer Support.

Warning:

Do not abort a payment process using the Apex Jobs monitoring page.

Retrieving accounts

The first thing you need to do to create a payment proposal is to retrieve a list of accounts with outstanding invoices, credit notes, journals and unmatched cash entries. Intercompany accounts do not have accounts receivable or account payable control accounts, and so they are ignored.

You can do this in one of two ways:

• with a payment template Set of default values used to generate a payment proposal.
• without a payment template

If you specify a payment template, the template settings are used as default payment criteria. Most fields are read-only in this context.

If you do not use a payment template, you must enter all the required payment criteria manually each time.

When you click Retrieve Accounts:

• The Payment Criteria section becomes completely read-only.
• The number of transactions that meet the payment criteria is calculated, before the process continues in one of two ways:
• If the number of transactions retrieved is relatively small, the account lines are displayed immediately, on the same page.
• If the number of transactions retrieved is relatively high, a message is displayed that tells you that the retrieval process is in progress. You can either wait until the process completes, or navigate away and reopen the proposal later.

Once you have retrieved the account lines, the total value of these transactions is displayed and you can drill-down into each account line to see the underlying transaction details.

Reviewing and refining the proposal

This stage, and all individual steps within it, are optional.

When the list of retrieved accounts is displayed:

• Use the column of checkboxes on the right-hand side of the list of accounts to exclude (deselect) whole accounts from the proposal.

  Alternatively, select the checkbox to reinstate previously excluded accounts.

  Checkboxes are in one of three states: payable (selected), excluded (clear) and partially payable (selected but dimmed)

  The checkbox in the heading row operates as a select all/deselect all control (for the viewable page only).

• Use the column of drill-down icons on the left-hand side of the list of accounts to display a list of related transactions.

The column of checkboxes, on the right-hand side of the list of transactions, works in the same way, except this time you are excluding individual transactions from the proposal. The total values to pay or collect dynamically update as you deselect/select accounts or transactions.

Part payments and discounts

You have the opportunity at this point to enter a part payment. Discounts are only applied when payment value plus discount equals the outstanding value. That is, you don't get the discount until you are entitled to it.

Note:

At transaction level, any part payment values are retained when you deselect/select. However, if you do this at account level the original outstanding values are restored.

What happens when I save a proposal?

• If the payment status is "Retrieved", the status of the payment changes to "Selected" and the transaction line statuses are changed from "Available" to "Proposed".
• Deselected accounts and/or transactions are excluded from the proposal.
• The payment media tables are prepared or updated as appropriate.

What happens when I pay a proposal?

This depends on the media type associated with the payment proposal.

Media type: Electronic

The relevant transactions are posted and automatically matched. You are notified of the success or failure of this operation.

Media type: Check

The check numbering screen is displayed.

Note:

The settlement discounts, if any, are based on the payment date and the credit terms Set of terms used to determine due dates and discounts for the goods and services bought or sold. Terms can be set at account level for vendors and/or company level for customers. in force when the documents that generated each transaction were posted.

Each time a transaction line item related to a sales or payable invoice or credit note is matched, the relevant document's payment details are updated to reflect the changes.

Once all transaction line items related to a sales or payable invoice or credit note have been paid in full – they all have a match status of "Matched", the relevant document's payment status is updated to "Paid".

What happens when I clear a payment's history?

Once you have a posted and matched a payment, or if you have discarded it, you can clear its payment history to delete the payment record and remove all related information from the payment media tables.

Once you clear a payment's history, its details may no longer be retrieved via the Payments tab. This means that you can no longer cancel it. However, the corresponding matched transactions will remain intact.