Management of overdue receivables - Monits

In any company, regardless of its size or industry, timely payment of receivables by customers is crucial to maintaining liquidity. Unfortunately, in practice, delays in payment occur frequently - for various reasons: from a simple oversight of the deadline to temporary financial problems of the counterparty. Overdue invoices pose a real risk to the company, which is why it is so important to systematically monitor receivables and remind customers of overdue payments.

Monits, i.e. formal reminders to settle obligations, are one of the basic tools supporting the soft debt collection process. In everyday life we also encounter similar mechanisms - banks remind us of loan installments, telecom operators of unpaid bills, and online stores of unpaid orders. Regular and polite reminders not only help shorten the waiting time for payment, but also help build professional relationships with customers.

In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the process of monitoring overdue receivables and sending reminders has been automated and simplified as much as possible. The system allows not only to keep track of unpaid invoices, but also to generate and send payment reminders to customers - both in paper and electronic form.

In order to start playing with reminders in Business Central and to fully understand their flow, it is necessary to specify several related settings beforehand. At the very beginning, we will start with the "Monitory Conditions," deciding when and how the reminder should be sent to the buyer.

We must define the desired condition code, description, maximum number of reminders that can be created, optional posting of interest, additional charges as well as additional charges by line. We can also specify the minimum amount based on which a reminder will be created. The reminder conditions code, thus defined, should be assigned directly on the purchaser's file.

Going deeper into the detailed settings, go to the reminder levels. We set them according to our business policy and the need to inform about the backlog. For example, we will create three of them:

Grace period - the length of time after which the system can generate a reminder for an overdue receivable

Payment term formula - defines the payment term that the reminder will receive from the date of its issuance

In addition, the system allows us to calculate interest, determine the amount of additional fee and its type of calculation.

Each defined prompt level, has its own individual start and end text.

Example of initial text:

Example of the final text:

After specifying the above settings, we can proceed to create a prompt by going to the "Monites" file in Business Central. The "Create Monito" function available there is the easiest way to create the target desired monito. Using it, we can generate working reminders thanks to the appropriate filters of buyers, records, dates, etc., which make it firmly easier for us.

Thus, we generated a reminder line, for the desired buyer with an overdue amount.

Moving to the center of the generated reminder, at first glance we can see the format of a standard document, consisting of a header and lines. In the former we have information about the buyer, the level of the reminder and the relevant dates specified in the filters during creation. In the rows, on the other hand, we see the corresponding overdue accounts receivable records along with the beginning and ending text we specified earlier. Most of the data is still editable until generated.

When we are sure that all the data contained in the prompt is correct, we can proceed to the last step, which is the generation of the prompt.

We can find the generated prompt in the "Generatedprompts" file.

From there, we can print it out, wishing to send it to the buyer in paper form, or send it directly by email.

We can still, as an experiment, verify the correctness of the levels of reminders that we defined at the very beginning. While we have already generated the first level reminder, wanting to generate it again for the same dates, the system will not create any document.

On the other hand (as an example), when we maneuver the date of the document forward, we already get a level two prompt according to the definition of levels, for which we can specify, for example, a completely different form of the initial and final text.

I hope I have succeeded in introducing you to the possibility of monitoring overdue receivables within the Business Central system, and with the help of this article, anyone who needs to clarify the reminder settings in their enterprise will receive a shot of helpful knowledge. That's all for today from my side, and I encourage you, as always, to test the functionality and follow our blog to learn more useful capabilities of the Business Central system.