Manual Entry in a Journal

161 2. Automatic payment dates. 3. Separating payment preparation and payment approval in your company. 4. Preparing an order during the week containing several payments, then creating a payment file at the end of the week. 5. Creating a file for electronic payment which can be sent to a bank for execution. 6. Splitting payments depending on the balances available in your various bank accounts. 13.4.1 How to Manage your Payment Orders? To use the tool for managing payments you must first install the module account_payment, or install Supplier Payments from the Configuration Wizard. It is part of the core OpenERP system. The system lets you enter a series of payments to be carried out from your various bank accounts. Once the different payments have been registered you can validate the payment orders. During validation you can modify and approve the payment orders, sending the order to the bank for electronic funds transfer. For example if you have to pay a supplier’s invoice for a large amount you can split the payments amongst several bank accounts according to their available balance. To do this you can prepare several Draft orders and validate them once you are satisfied that the split is correct. This process can also be regularly scheduled. In some companies, a payment order is kept in Draft state and payments are added to the draft list each day. At the end of the week the accountant reviews and confirms all the waiting payment orders. Once the payment order is confirmed there is still a validation step for an accountant to carry out. You could imagine that these orders would be prepared by an accounts clerk, and then approved by a manager to go ahead with payment. Tip: Payment Workflow An OpenERP workflow is associated with each payment order. Select a payment order and if you are in the GTK client click Plugins → Print workflow from the top menu. You can integrate more complex workflow rules to manage payment orders by adapting the workflow. For example, in some companies payments must be approved by a manager under certain cash flow or value limit conditions. Figure 13.8: Payments Workflow In small businesses it is usually the same person who enters the payment orders and who validates them. In this case you should just click the two buttons, one after the other, to confirm the payment.

13.4.2 Prepare and Transfer Orders

To enter a payment order, use the menu Accounting → Payment → Payment Orders. 162 Figure 13.9: Entering a Payment Order OpenERP then proposes a reference number for your payment order. You then have to choose a payment mode from the various methods available to your company. These have to be configured when you set the accounting system up using menu Accounting → Configuration → Miscellaneous → Payment Mode. Some examples are: • Cheques • Bank transfer, • Visa card on a bank account, • Petty cash. Then you set the Preferred date for payment: • Due date : each operation will be effected at the invoice deadline date, • Directly : the operations will be effected when the orders are validated, • Fixed date : you must specify an effective payment date in the Scheduled date if fixed field that follows. The date is particularly important for the preparation of electronic transfers because banking interfaces enable you to select a future execution date for each operation. So to configure your OpenERP most simply you can choose to pay all invoices automatically by their deadline. You must then select the invoices to pay. They can be entered manually in the field Payment Line, but it is easier to add them automatically. For that, click Select Invoices to Pay and OpenERP will then propose lines with payment deadlines. For each deadline you can see: • the invoice Effective date, • the reference Ref. and description of the invoice, Name, • the deadline for the invoice, • the amount to be paid in the company’s default currency, • the amount to be paid in the currency of the invoice.