Firstly – I wanted to wish all the followers and visitors of my blog a Happy, Prosperous and Safe New year. 2020 has been tough for all of us on many fronts, each of us are impacted with the pandemic in one way or the other. However – on the brighter side, my blog readership had a fantastic year and the number of views and visitors increased almost twice from 2019. So A BIG THANK YOU to all the people who follow and share my posts. I also thank all my friends for encouraging me and my mentor who has encouraged me to continue blogging since my first post. It truly encourages me to come up with more quality content and I hope 2021 would be the year where I can contribute many more functional areas, coming out of my comfort zone.

Having said all that, I wanted to dive into the new post about posting of Vendor invoices using a batch process. So let’s go!

In the previous post, we have seen how matching of receipts to invoice can happen in a background process without the users having to match the receipts and invoices manually which was usually the process in the previous versions Dynamics AX and Dynamics 365 Finance.

In this post, we will review, on how we can leverage a batch process that can post the invoices even when a workflow is assigned. In earlier versions of Dynamics 365 Finance if there was a need to batch post the invoices, the only possible way was to have custom batch process.

With the 2020 Wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Finance – this process has been automated using a workflow. Essentially, you can have a batch processing task added in the workflow that would club invoices that are truly matched up and post them. Let us review the process in detail.

The basic configurations would be to verify if the below 2 processes under Background processes of Process automation (System administration -> Setup -> Process automations) are scheduled.

If you do not see any of these processes executing, run the “Initialize background process” job to initialize them.

As mentioned in the post earlier, since this processing is dependent on workflow, we will need a workflow to be configured that would be posting these invoices. There is a new automated task that is provided to handle this process.

For that, I have created a simple Vendor invoice as below with the automated task – Post the vendor invoice using a batch.

There are some more configurations under Accounts Payable -> Parameters -> Invoice -> Invoice workflow (fasttab).

Number invoices per batch: The count of invoices that can be posted in one batch run.

Hours before posting is rescheduled: If the invoice has not been posted in the first run, this parameter would reprocess the invoice after the number of hours mentioned here.

Frequency of background processing: In minutes, the frequency at which the job should be executing to post the invoice.

I have created 2 invoices as and will be submitting them to workflow for posting.

After the job execution completes – which in my case is executing every minute, these 2 invoices would be posted. The results can be viewed from Process automation -> Background processes logs as below.

And as you can see – both the invoices have been posted in the same batch run.

With these steps, majority of the AP processing can be automated with no customization and improve the productivity.

In coming few blogs, I will touch upon some more Process automations that Microsoft has introduced in Cash flow forecasting, and in Credit and Collections space.