Alternatives to Suggest Vendor Payments in D365 Business Central

Suppose you’re part of an Accounts Payable team (or the single AP person) and use Dynamics 365 Business Central. In that case, you may be familiar with both the Suggest Vendor Payments function (to cut checks) and the Payment Journal Page (to post payments). 

While that works well when you issue several checks at a time, what if you only need to cut one check? Fortunately, there’s more than one way to cut a check (or checks) in Business Central versus just using Suggest Vendor Payments. Below are three options (with screenshots) that may work for you. 

Manually Entering Payment Lines into Payment Journal 

You can enter payment lines manually on an invoice-by-invoice basis. Open the appropriate Payment Journal. Then, confirm the payment date is as needed. (More detail is in the screenshot below.) 

• Input/select vendor needed in the Account No. column.  
• Select “Invoice” in the Applies-to Doc Type column. Then, click on the ellipsis in the Applies-to Doc No. column to show all open invoices for the vendor.  
• Note that the Bank Payment Type column has “Computer Check” selected for this example. You can assume the payment line will be a printed check. 

• After clicking on the ellipsis in the Applies to Doc No. column, you should see all the open invoices for the vendor. Highlight the invoice you need to pay and click OK. This manual payment entry process highlights selecting one invoice per payment line, as seen below. 

I have repeated the process on a second line choosing a second invoice for the same vendor as shown below. Notice that the document number has incremented below.

Printing Multiple Payment Lines as Separate Checks 

When printing the check(s) for the manually entered payment lines shown above, you have the option of printing the two selected payment lines on separate checks. To do this, select one check per vendor, per document number option on the Print Checks setup screen, as shown below. 

Using the Apply Entries Process 

A second option for manually selecting Payment Journal lines is to enter one line per vendor and use the Process > Apply Entries process found on the top ribbon. This will open a screen that shows the open payables for a vendor. You can select the invoice(s) needed to print on the check, as shown below. 

• On the Apply Entries screen, select the invoice(s) needed.  

• Next, click on Process > Set Applies-to ID in the upper left corner, then click OK (bottom right). 

This will update the payment line with the amount of the invoice(s) selected to be on the printed check, as shown below. 

Open the Vendor Ledger Entries 

Another option that will create payment lines similar to the Apply Entries process above is to open the Vendor Ledger Entries. Below, I have filtered those Vendor Ledger Entries to Invoices that are open and selected two invoices for three vendors. 

• Click on Process > Create Payment from the top ribbon. 

• When you click on Create payment, you can fill in the Create Payment screen (see below). 

The system will now create the payment lines into the payment journal, as shown below. 

These are only some of the options available for payments in Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you have any questions about this or any other Business Central function, please reach out to Enavate Client Care. We would be glad to walk you through the process.