Payment Terms in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016

Hello and welcome to the NAV Viking Coffee Mug Tutorials. Today what I wanted to go through is Payment Terms. Payment terms, even though it’s a little small thing inside NAV of all the features, it can be a little bit tricky to understand, but once you got it, of course, it’s easy. The main reason why it’s a little bit tricky is because it’s very flexible; you can put in all kinds of dates or date calculations in there and sometimes it’s a little hard to understand which date drives what.

So to begin with I’m going to go into Purchase Orders and I’m going to create a new one to one of our good vendors: Progressive Home Furnishings. And in here I’m going to open up a tab called Invoicing, just like that. I’m going to close out my lines. So I’m just going to be looking at these two tabs. I have here that Progressive Home Furnishings has a payment term ‘CM’ - and if I look into what that is it says Current Month. So what is Current Month? It seems a little bit tricky to understand.

But the Due Date is 10/31 and the Document Date is 10/19, so from that of course we can infer that it’s going to be the last date of the current month. So basically, the Current Month means that you are allowed to pay it in this month that we are in and the system is going to pick the last date of course, because we always want to pick the last possible time or at least that seems to be the trend in most companies.

So if I change the document date - and it’s important to note that the document date is the one that drives the due date - so not the order date, not the posting date, but the document date. That is the date on the invoice from them. So if I change that to say the 25th of October, notice that the due date does not change.

If I change it to the 1st of November then it moves it to the last day of November. So let’s go ahead and take a quick look at what possibilities are here. I have 14 days, 21 days, Cash on Delivery etc. So I can see the formula in here as well. So 14 days is 14D, that’s the formula that goes with that. One month, it actually has a payment discount in here in 8 days.... so one month is 1M, 21 days is 21D so hopefully you get the idea. If I pick Cash on Delivery which is zero days, I can just put that in here and then that’s the actual day that I put the document date in. If I change that to be ‘T’ which is today’s date - that’s a little shortcut - then it changes the due date to the 19th.

Ok, so how do we figure out all these formulas? Well there’s a page on Microsoft, if you go to MSDN - if you just google CalcDate in MSDN. You get this page and this page is notoriously difficult to understand unless you just read in programming languages or you understand programming very well. I’m, however, going to attempt to do this in English, explain this page.

So here it’s basically saying that your date expression which could be 30 days or current week etc, is made out of subexpressions. And what is a subexpression? A subexpression is something of a sign and a term. And the sign can be plus or minus and the term is something else.  Now the sign it’s important to notice that plus is usually what you do. If you omit the plus, of course, it’s going to be just a number. But you could be negative you could say negative 21 days and that actually goes backwards so this allows for that.

And what is the term? A term is made out of number and unit or unit and number, meaning you could actually put the number before the month or day or whatever it is or even after, or a prefix in a unit. And number is just a normal positive integer; the unit is anyone of these. So this is important to remember. You can use day, weekday, week, month, quarter and year, so these are the symbols that you can use that correspond to days.

Weekday is kind of cool because it will skip the weekend, so if you say plus three weekdays and you are on a Friday, it will go into Wednesday so it will skip the Saturday and Sunday. And then the prefix, last here on the list, can be ‘C’. So ‘C’ is Current, just like we saw before. Current Month means the last day of the current period I am in. It’s a good thing to remember - the last day of the current period I am in.

So here we see some examples, 30 days. What I’m actually going to do is do something funky, I’m going to say Current Quarter and create a new payment term called Current Quarter so that should be the last day of the quarter that I’m in. I’m going to go in here, into the Purchase Order, look this up, go into Advanced and edit this list to create a new one and I’m going to call it CQ.

My due date calculation is going to be CQ and the Description is going to be Current Quarter. Ok so if I hit Enter on that or Ok and I change this, notice that it puts me at the end of the year because 10/19 is in the fourth quarter and that means that the due date is going to be the end of fourth quarter which happens to the end of the year.

So hopefully this explained how Payment Terms work, how they are driven; they are driven by the document date, so the due date is driven by the document date and we have all of these formulas that we can use, and that page on MSDN is very helpful in, kind of, clearing that up. That was all.