Accounts Payable - Bulk Vendor Payment Creation

Overview

Bulk Vendor Payment Creation is used to create Vendor Payments for previously entered unpaid vendor invoices and unapplied payments.  This task will typically be the first step in the Check Generation process.   On this screen, you will supply both Search Criteria (to identify the Legal Entity, Vendor of interest, and other filtering options), as well as supply Creation Attributes that will be needed during the Vendor Payment creation process (i.e. Bank Account, Payment Date, Payment Method, etc.).

In addition to vendor invoices or overapplied vendor payments that match the search criteria, the resulting list may also include all posted vendor invoices having a negative balance and any unapplied vendor payments for vendors whose vendor invoices have been selected.  These negative balances can be used to reduce the payment amount of the vendor payment.  Should the total selected payment amount for a vendor be below zero, the amount applied should be limited to the amount necessary to take the total vendor payment down to zero.

Once the List has been refined and specific items selected for inclusion, clicking the Create Payments button will initiate the process.  This process will create one or more payment documents for the specified vendors.  These payment documents will then be available for edit or to include in a check run via the Vendor Payments screen.

Roles

This screen is available to users having any of the following roles: Administrator, AP User or AP Poster.  

License

This screen is available with the Project Financials family of Unanet licenses.

Topics covered on this help page include:

• Search                                                     (to refine the list of items to be included and provide creation attributes)

• List                                                           (to select which items will be included)

• Create Payments Process                  (to generate Vendor Payments)

You may also be interested in:

• Vendor Payments

• Import Vendor Payment

• Export Vendor Payment

• Vendor Invoices

• Create Vendor Invoices from Expense Reports

• Check Print History

• Expense Report Status Report

Search

Using the Search screen, you will supply both search criteria and required attributes that will be needed during the Vendor Payment creation process.  

• Search Criteria

• • Legal Entity must be specified, otherwise, all other Search Criteria is optional.

  • Legal Entity and Vendor search criteria apply to filtering Vendor Invoices and Vendor Payments, all other search criteria applies only to Vendor Invoices

  • When changing the Legal Entity:

  • • the Bank Account drop-down is reset to show the bank accounts for organizations in this legal entity
    • the Fiscal Period is re-defaulted
    • the Post Date is re-defaulted

• Vendor Payment Creation Attributes

• • The fields in this section are required (i.e. Bank Account, Payment Date, Post Date, Fiscal Period and Payment Method).

  • When changing the Bank Account:

  • • the Payment Method is re-defaulted

Field Descriptions (click on a link below for additional information):

List

From the list of available entries, you can check one or many of the entries to include in the Vendor Payment creation process.  Clicking on the Check All option at the top will toggle the check boxes on each row on and off.  Note that those items marked as On Hold, must be manually checked and unchecked independent of the Check All functionality.

Should the total of the selected payments for a vendor be below zero, the amount applied will be limited to the amount necessary to take the total vendor payment down to zero (but not below).  The order in which amounts are applied is discussed further in the Create Payment Process section below.  In such cases, this will only happen if the Create Zero Balance Payments check box is checked, otherwise a warning message will indicate the total payment amount is below zero.

The entries displayed in the resulting List screen will meet the following criteria:

• Vendor Invoices and Vendor Payments may appear in the list.
• Only documents having a POSTED status will be included.
• Only documents having a non-zero balance will be included.
• Only documents having a Post Date less than or equal to the supplied Fiscal Period end date will be included.
• Voided documents will be included.
• Voiding documents will not be included.
• Vendor Payment application documents will not be included.
• Should all documents for a Vendor have negative Balances then none of those documents will be included (that is, if at least one positive Balance document exist for a Vendor, all eligible documents for that Vendor will be displayed (including both positive and negative entries).
• Results are ordered by Vendor, Doc Type (+ VIs, + VPs, - VIs, - VPs), Separate Payment, Due Date, Discount Date, Vendor Invoice/Payment Date, and finally Vendor Invoice/Reference #.
• Other selection criteria filtering may further limit the returned entries.

After selecting the desired entries, you can click on the Create Payments button to initiate the Create Payment Process.

Field Descriptions (click on a link below for additional information):

Create Payments Process

Once items have been selected on the List screen, the process can be initiated by clicking on the Create Payments button.

Each newly generated Vendor Payment will contain Summary information as supplied on the Search screen, including:

• Bank Account
• Payment Date
• Post Date
• Fiscal Period
• Payment Method
• Description

The newly generated Vendor Payments will be left in the INUSE status, available for further editing, summitting or posting.

Validations
A warning message will be displayed if a Payment Method having a Type of "System Check" is selected, when the vendor has no default Remit To address defined on their Organization >> Address screen.  

Process Description

• For each distinct Vendor included in the list:
• • The process will first generate a Vendor Payment for each Vendor Invoice marked as requiring a Separate Check, including details of the invoice (Payment, Discount) as included document attributes.
  • Secondly, one additional Vendor Payment will be generated to include all remaining documents for that Vendor.
• Items in the list will be processed in the following order:
  • Positive balance vendor invoices,
  • Positive balance vendor payments,
  • Negative balance vendor invoices,
  • Negative balance vendor payments.
• Impact of the Create Zero Balance Payments option:
• • When the Create Zero Balance Payments option is NOT checked and the document balance becomes negative (after adding all negative invoices and payments), we will not create the vendor payment for this vendor, but instead display an error indicating the payment would result in a zero balance payment.
  • When the Create Zero Balance Payments option is checked, we will:
    • Apply all positive balance documents
    • Add negative documents in the order of Payment Date, (invoices, then payments)
    • If any document causes the balance to become negative, only part of the document's Payment amount will be applied to the created vendor payment (bringing the payment amount to zero).
    • Any selected document after this one (negative balance documents having a later Payment Date) will be ignored.
    • The included document's Payment amount will equal the portion of Payment Amount applied to bring document's balance to zero.
• All applied documents will be treated as included documents, with:
• • Payment amount defaulting to applied amount.
  • Discount defaulting to:
  • • Zero (when original discount is zero, or Payment Date is later than Discount date)
    • Original discount amount minus discount amount from applied documents (if any) (when Payment Date is before Discount Date).

Process Feedback

As the Vendor Payments are created, details of each document created will be displayed along with the start and end date / time stamp for the overall process.

Upon completion of the process, you will have two navigation choices via the available buttons:

• Back - navigates back to the Bulk Vendor Payment Creation screen
• List - navigates to the Vendor Payment List screen displaying the newly created Vendor Payment (so long as at least one was created).