144 - Cash Flow in Microsoft D365 Business Central

Cash Flow in Microsoft D365 Business Central

I was doing some of that in NAV 2018, and now I'm gonna just keep going with the functionality inside Business Central so this is new functionality I haven't taped this before. But it's inside Business Central and it works just as well in NAV 2018 or even previous versions, so you just have to kind of understand that it might look different, but it works for out.

Cash Flow Forecast
I'm going to go into Search, go into Cash flow Forecast and I have one cash flow forecast in the system, default one. Just to reminding us how this works, I can see the cash viability by periods for this forecast and that is the whole purpose of it, just to see how our cash is doing. So I have this much in receivables, this much is payables. The total is here and I got my liquid funds here 9800. So you can see it takes into account liquid funds, of course, 67000 is here, 49,000 I have to pay and since I have 98,000. I have 116, 000 left.

This is all based on time obviously cash flow, I never understand how you can do cashflow with account schedules, some people have set that up, but you know. One of the biggest problems with cash flow is that people just don’t pay you on time, and sometimes you negotiate with the vendors, so its that game of texts in the mail.

What we are going to do, is explore how we can account for that in the customer management. So, if I close this out and I go in here, I'm just going to show you in the cash flow worksheet, where we register changes. I hit suggest worksheet lines, I get in my liquid funds, my receivables, my payables, I hit ok. So that basically grabs all the invoices, all the sales invoices, purchases invoices that are in the system and puts it into this worksheet. And I can change the dates here if I wanted to.

If I wanted to modify this I can. If for example here, we see that the school Fine Arts has a few invoices that were due on the 28th of February, the system is putting me to the work date, which is basically saying that they are going to pay today. Chances are, not all the invoices are going to get payed today, so that is kind of annoying to do that. And if I go into this manually and change the dates, that would be also annoying because there might be lots of invoices. So, I'm just going to register this, so it goes into my cash flow, and I'm going to show you a little feature that can be useful when it comes to this.

If I go into the actual forecast which is the default. I have a couple of options here, one of them is, for example, mote over to cash flow dates to work day. That’s what happened with that invoices, it got pushed to April 9th to work day and all the overdue invoices. It's doing that. Ok. But we have something else here.

Consider cash flow payment terms. What does that allow me to do? again its maybe not the perfect scenario, but it's much better. If I go into my customer list, right here. I go into School of Fine Art and here I can go into the payments and I have here the Cash flow payments term code. So, I can setup different cash flow payment term. Basically, we might have net 30 with a customer, we know they always pay 2 months late or a month late. I'm going to be a little bit extreme here, I'm going to pick something long.

New Cash Flow payment terms.
I'm going to create new payment terms, I'm going to call it 6 months, obviously, it's crazy extreme. And I'm going t put them on 6 months But I'm just doing that to explain the whole thing. Now if you are using Business Central and you are trying to follow this video and you cannot find cash flow payments terms here. You would have to go into designer up here and drop it in Because out of the box is not showing. I don’t know why, but it isn't. Maybe it will be in the next version.

If I go out here. I am going to go into the Cash flow forecast again. If I go into my worksheet and I do suggest lines, I'm going to keep a keen eye on the School of Fine Arts, look at that, so the School of Fine Arts, instead of putting into the workday, it puts it into August, because they have now a six months term in cash flow. We don’t believe they are going to pay us anytime soon, and we don’t want to account for that coming into the cash flow. At least you can do it like that. It would be great if you could push it even further with some more tactics but this is what comes out of the box. It would help basically with creating a realistic Cash flow.