Method of Payment and Payment Proposal Linkage

While defining the Method of Payment in AX, I was wondering where does the value in the field (dropdown / pick-list, to be more precise) PERIOD affects the whole system. The values in the drop down are; Invoice, Date, Week and Total. This question was obvious because while creating and posting the payment journal, I couldn't figure out where these values are impacting. However later when I used the Payment Proposal for generating the payment lines in the payment proposal, I noticed the difference. We will consider the payment method as Check, for this particular post so as to detail this entire concept out.

For Period = Invoice, when I created a Payment Proposal, the Payment Proposal Lines are displayed in the bottom half of the form and the related open invoices are displayed in the top half of the form. When the Period = Invoice was selected, the system generated one payment line for each open invoice. When I clicked Transfer, one line per invoice was created in the journal. This is simple isn't it...!

For Period = Date, when I created a Payment Proposal, the system generated one payment line combining all the invoices having same Method of Payment, that had due date prior to the date (including today) when the payment proposal is created .i.e. today OR date specified in the MINIMUM DATE field PLUS each payment line for the invoices (or combination of the invoices if the future due date for the invoices is same) having same Method of Payment, that had due date after today OR date specified in the MINIMUM DATE.

For Period = Total, when I created a Payment Proposal, the system generated one payment line for all the invoices per Method of Payment (that were due previous to today OR date specified in the MINIMUM DATE PLUS invoices that were due later to today OR date specified in the MINIMUM DATE, both) for the date selected in the Total Payment Date .

Suppose the user selected date in the Total Payment Date field is less than the date selected in the Minimum date field, then the payment lines are generated based on the Minimum Date. And if the user selected date in the Total Payment Date field is more than the date selected in the Minimum date field, then the payment lines are generated based on the Total Payment date. But in any case payment lines will not be generated for the date less than today. And top of it, once the lines are transferred into the payment journal, there you can change the date of posting, which can be a future date as well as previous date. The Total Payment Date field works only when the Period on the Method of Payment is selected as Total.

NOTE: This can be made as complex as possible. By this I mean:

• We can include more than one methods of payment (CHECK and ELECTRONIC) on the same payment proposal having same Period = Invoice, Date, Weekday or Total
• We can include more than one methods of payment (CHECK and ELECTRONIC) on the same payment proposal having different Period = Invoice, Date, Weekday or Total. For CHECK, the Period = Date and ELECTRONIC, the Period = Total.
• We can further complicate by adding more vendors in the query and this can go on and on...

For Period = Weekday, when I created a Payment Proposal, the system generated payment lines based on the day selected in the Weekday drop down of the payment proposal screen. If no day is selected, then by default Monday is taken by the system to generate the transactions. The system adjusts the distribution of the payments such that most the of payment lines will have payment day as Monday (if Monday is selected as the value in Weekday), which however could be changed once the lines are transferred to the journal. One more thing while playing around with this option, every time I generated the payment proposal, I used to get this warning message, which after 100 trials, I could not get rid of :-(.The warning message was : "Payment date is suggested to 8/17/2013 as Monday 8/12/2013 is after due date." And above all this was appearing for all the days selected. By far I haven't seen anybody using this value in the Method of Payment, so chill.

This was about the actual implication of the values selected in the Method of Payment for Period attribute. But please do not stress yourselves (like the way I stressed myself :-)), as mostly the Period for all the Method of Payments is Invoice only.

Now something more about the Payment Proposal screen, that I came to know while doing all this testing.

Amount Limit : If you define the Amount Limit, the Payment lines will be generated within that amount limit.

Transaction Limit: If you define the Transaction Limit, then only those number of Payment Lines will be created, based on the data.

If you try to define both (Amount Limit and Transaction Limit) then, system gives following error:
Do not use both max amount and max number of lines.

Payment Date : Transactions that fall within that range will only be included in the proposal.

Total Payment Date and Weekday only are used and useful when the Period in Method of Payment is Total and Week respectively.

Minimum Date : This is by default the date when the user opens the payment proposal screen. This can be changed to the future date and the payment lines are then created as per that date. However if the date prior to today is given, the system still takes today's date for the creation of payment lines. More details on this is mentioned in the paragraph for Period = Total.

Once the payment lines are generated and if those contain lines with multiple Methods of Payment, then system warns you based on the setting done in the parameters section. If the payment lines have a combination of CHECK and ELECTRONIC and if the user clicks Generate Payment, then the system generates checks for the lines where Method of Payment = Check, changes it status to SENT. The line with Method of Payment = Electronic are remains unaffected during this process. Once the payment is generated for CHECK, then the user can click the post button to post the payment journal and the journal lines with both the Method of Payments is posted.

Thanks!

AXAPTAMANIAC