Streamlining payables processing by prioritizing vendors

Management of vendor payments is a critical activity for any firm; it's even more critical in difficult economic times. Companies need to understand and control payments and a key component of this is prioritizing vendors. Every firm has both critical and expendable vendors. Paying critical vendors on time is a key business driver.

For example, a newspaper that doesn't pay their newsprint supplier won't be in business long. However, they can safely delay payments to their janitorial vendor without worrying about going under.

Dynamics GP provides a mechanism to prioritize vendors and apply those priorities when selecting which checks to print. That is the focus of this recipe.

Getting ready

Setting this up first requires that the company figure out who the priority vendors are. That part is beyond the scope of this book. The Vendor Priority field in Dynamics GP is a three-character field, but users shouldn't be seduced by the possibilities of three characters. A best practice is to keep the priorities simple by using 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C. Anything more complicated than that tends to confuse users and actually makes it harder to prioritize vendors.

Once the vendor priorities have been determined, the priority needs to be set in Dynamics GP. Attaching a priority to a vendor is the first step. To do that follow these steps:

1. Select Purchasing from the Navigation pane. In the Purchasing area page under Cards, click Vendor Maintenance.
2. Once the Vendor Maintenance window opens, select the lookup button (magnifying glass) next to Vendor ID.
3. Select a vendor and click OK.
4. Once the vendor information is populated, click the Options button. This opens the Vendor Maintenance Options screen.
5. In the center left is the Payment Priority field. Enter 1 in Payment Priority and click OK on the Vendor Maintenance window:
   

How to do it…

Now that a vendor has been set up with a priority, let's see how to apply that information when selecting checks to print:

1. To use vendor priorities to select invoices for payment, click Select Checks from the Transactions on the Purchasing area page.
2. In the Select Payables Checks window enter CHECKS to name the check batch. Press Tab to move away from the Batch ID field and click Add to add the batch.
3. Pick a checkbook ID and click Save to save the batch.
4. In the Select field, click the drop-down box and select Payment Priority. Enter 1 in both the From and To boxes.
5. Click the Insert >> button to lock in Payment Priority as an option:
   
6. Click Build Batch at the top. If there are any transactions where the vendor is set to a priority of 1 this will populate a batch of checks based on the vendor priority:
   

How it works…

Since priority is one of the built-in options for selecting checks, it's easy to ensure that high-priority vendors get selected to be paid first. All of this is easily accomplished with basic Dynamics GP functionality that most people miss.