When you’ve got hundreds of payments to make each month, you need a reliable process in place.
You need to ensure that invoices, particularly those relating to essential purchases, are paid using the correct payment method and due date rules. And you certainly only want to pay them once!
Mysoft’s team of experts can help you to set up your electronic payment file template and then there are a few simple steps to follow to ensure a successful payment run in X3:
- Attach bank details to your bank accounts and suppliers. For overseas suppliers, you’ll need their BIC and IBAN details.
- Attach default payment terms to your suppliers. In X3 you can set up a variety of different payment rules, plus for electronic payments these need to be relevant to the payment method being used; such as whether you’re paying by BACS for UK or SEPA for European payments.
- Use the ‘Open Items’ function in X3 to review your outstanding invoices to ensure that you’ve got the correct payment methods in place – this is particularly important if you have already posted invoices and you are transitioning to electronic payments.
- When you are preparing your payment run, decide which invoices you’re going to pay using the ‘Payment Proposals’ function. You can select your invoices according to various criteria, such as company and site, due date and type of supplier and then decide on how payments are going to be grouped.
- Decide when your payments physically need to be made and then use the ‘Remittance’ function to create and download the bank file for your payment run. You can still make changes to your run, but once you know that the payments have been made successfully using your chosen payment software, you can finalise the postings to update the appropriate bank and purchase ledger accounts.
If you have a mixture of domestic and overseas suppliers, then bear in mind that the payment file formats for BACS (or Faster Payments) and SEPA will be different. It may make sense to put those suppliers into separate supplier categories and apply the file formats and payment methods at category level. Remember also to check that your payments have been made successfully. If you are paying by BACS, for instance, as well as providing you with an online portal for you to collect your reports, BACS also enables you to sign up for email alerts to let you know when a new report is waiting for you.
The above also applies if you’re thinking of collecting payments from your customers by direct debit. You would need to obtain further sponsorship from your bank if you want to join the BACS or SEPA DD schemes. There are various scheme rules you would need to consider in terms of customer communications, notice periods, and so on, but when it comes to X3, the process for collecting payments from customers is very similar to what we’ve just seen above for payments.
