Invoicing Process for Accounts Receivable in Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central 365

In my last blog about the Sales to Cash process, I discussed the benefits of using the Sales Quote process and converting it to an order (here). Of course, in order to get our cash from our customers, we need to ship and invoice our products.

When it comes to invoicing, as usual, we have more than one way to do this in the system. How you decide to do this will depend on the size and capabilities of your sales, finance, and IT functions.

First, the least commonly used method which uses the best segregation of duties with your teams. To determine the orders ready to invoice, filter the Sales Order list where the Shipped Not Invoiced field is set to Yes. This is a filter on the header of the Sales Order.

By drilling into the Sales Order, I can see which lines need to be invoiced and determine the appropriate posting date for the invoice. I can also determine the shipment(s) that need to be invoiced.

To invoice this order, I need to start by creating a new Sales Invoice and assigning the appropriate Customer to the invoice. Once the Invoice has been created, I need to bring in the shipment lines to invoice by selecting Line \ Functions \ Get Shipment Lines.

Any shipment lines outstanding to be invoiced will show on the page that opens. Unfortunately, the related Sales Order information is not immediately available in this screen, however, you can access this information quickly.

While this invoicing option is often not used because of the manual steps necessary to create the invoices, one main benefit is the ability to invoice multiple shipments on a single invoice. Here, I can select all outstanding lines to invoice and select OK to bring them into the invoice.

The result is an invoice that references the shipment information for your customer’s benefit. From here review, add any additional charges as necessary and Post and your invoice is complete.

This process is quite manual, and because of that we often see companies decide to invoice directly off the Sales Order. This time, once I’ve filtered my Sales Order list, I’ll do all my work from this page.

The Posting Date on the Sales Order will be updated with each shipment that has occurred. If invoicing is occurring soon after shipment, you can rely on the posting date currently in the order. To create the invoice, update the Qty. to Invoice for lines shipped, make any changes or updates as necessary and Post.

The options for creating the invoice are Ship, Invoice, and Ship and Invoice. In most cases, the Invoice should be sufficient at this time. If you’ve added a line for additional charges like freight, those lines will need to be shipped and invoiced.

You can see there is also the ability to post the entire list as a Batch. This can be useful if your Sales Orders are ready to post without any additional review and updates. If changes are necessary, review each one, update and post the entire batch together.

Don’t forget, if you’ve added lines for resources or other charges, you need to ship them as well. The Posting Date used for the invoice will be the date identified in the Sales Order header, unless the option to replace the posting date is selected in the options box.

With the click of a button, the entire list is posted.

Here, we can see the list of posted sales documents.

All options discussed here do require manual intervention by a person. The final option is to work with your partner or internal development team to create a job queue to post (and hopefully email) your invoices out. To do this, you may want to implement a review process for orders that have been shipped but not invoiced prior to this job queue kicking off.

As always, there is more than one way to complete the invoicing process in NAV and BC. Review your options with your team to determine what process works best for your company and your constraints.