Simplify Your Bulk Invoicing for Businesses

Bulk invoicing for businesses

this is a demo of the purchase invoice import add-on for Dynamics 365 business Central by Lighthouse experts group the purchase invoice import allows you to do a bulk import of purchase invoices or purchase credit memos into business Central from a regular Excel file and there's no need to follow a template you decide what Fields you want to import you decide and what order you want those fields and the import will take care of getting all the values into the right places in business Central the import will also perform all the necessary validations to make sure that any required Fields have been entered all the codes are valid all the dimensions values exist and so on so let me start by showing how to set up the Excel file with your invoices and then we'll run the import to see how the invoices get created in the system so if you don't have it already the first step is to get the list of available fields and you can get that from our website which is lighthouseexperts.com and when you navigate to our website just look for the purchase invoice import Link in the top level navigation and if you click on that it'll take you to a page where you'll see instructions and more information related to everything I'm going to show you today so we don't need this right now the only thing we need from here is the link to download the list of available fields which is right here and when you click on that link it'll open up a shared Google drive folder and you don't need a Google account to be able to access this so all you need to do is hit the download button on that file and once the file is downloaded just go ahead and open it and so you'll see some instructions here at the top but the important thing to notice is the field name column which is column A and the fact that some of these are in red and so the red ones are the required Fields so the first column in this file will just have all the available field names that you can use in your import the second column tells you if it's a header field or a line field so when it gets into business Central there's a header area for the purchase invoice and there's an area with the lines this this just tells you which area that field happens to be in the third column tells you if it's a required field or not the fourth column is the data type and you can have different data types the first one is option so if it's an option data type it'll tell you in the notes what are all the available options for that field separated by a slash so in this case with the document type we can see that there's two options either invoice or credit demo whereas for the type field you might have additional options so like GL account item resource fixed asset and so on when it's uh you know a date or a decimal that's pretty straightforward when it's a text or a code field it'll tell you within brackets what is the maximum amount of characters that you can have for that field so for example the buy from vendor number is a 20 character maximum code field whereas the vendor invoice number can be up to 35 characters and for all the other fields the notes column will just give you a little bit more information as to what's the purpose of that field and what it does in business Central but of course you can also find more information in the business Central help pages so let's go ahead and start filling in our template file or our in our import file to do this I will start by copying and pasting all the required Fields because I know I'm going to need them so I'll get all of these in here from the beginning when it comes to vendor invoice number and vendor credit memo number either one of them either one of them is required but not both at the same time so it really depends on your document type because the document type can either be invoice or credit member credit memo so for I'll create a few lines for invoices and I'll create a couple of credit memo lines but the point is when it's an invoice you would need to fill in the vendor invoice number and when it's a credit memo you will fill in the vendor credit memo number but you don't need to have both at the same time so type number and direct unit cost now in addition to these you know there's a couple of fields that I may like to add personally so uh one of them is quantity and maybe I'll add a description field only thing to be careful for here is if you're typing the header names manually manually like I am I just want to make sure to that they match what is in the field name list over here if you mistype one of these header lines you'll get an error message because the import won't be able to recognize which field you're referring to and then in terms of Dimensions there's a list of Dimensions down here going from shortcut Dimension One to eight you can either copy paste these in just like I have done over here and I'll just use the first two dimensions for my example but you can also type in the actual Dimension code So within business Central if you go to general ledger setup you can see what dimensions are set up as shortcut Dimensions so in my case I have department and customer group and if you like you can actually use the code for the dimension instead of shortcut Dimension One code or shortcut Dimension two posts so in this case because department is my shortcut Dimension one I can type Department it doesn't even have to be capitalized it can be typed like this or I can just use the regular shortcut Dimension to field name now let's start filling this in so in my demo database I know I have vendor numbers going from 10 000 to 50 000 so I'll just say that these these three lines relate to the first vendor these are for the second vendor and maybe one more invoice with the third vendor posting date I'll just use today's date and just to make it easy for myself I'll use the same date all the way down now vendor invoice number I'll use test01 for the first one but the important thing to notice is that I'm grouping all my lines for the same invoice together and you have to do this because whenever the vendor invoice number changes that's how the import knows to create a new document so if this is test02 and this is test03 um as the import goes through these lines one by one once it hits this line it'll detect that there was a change to the vendor invoice number and so it'll know that this line belongs on a brand new invoice and same over here so it'll enter these two lines on that second invoice once it gets here it'll see that the vendor number changes again and it'll create a third invoice so that's the reason why you need your invoice lines to be grouped together so that the import can properly detect when it's time to create a new document as for the credit memos the important thing here is that you fill in the vendor credit memo number so you could see that for invoice types I filled in the vendor invoice number and for credit memo types I filled in the vendor credit memo number now type can be one of GL account fixed asset item and so on I'm just going to use GL accounts to keep it simple but of course you could have an item in here you could have a fixed asset or whatever you normally use on your invoices and the number field relates to whatever type you've selected in here so for GL account it's an account from the chart of accounts and there's a couple of numbers that I know I can use here but if it was an item you would be putting in an item number if it was a fixed asset you would put in a fixed asset number quantity can be left blank because if you leave it blank it'll default it to one so you can type in a quantity if you have one and if you don't have one it'll just default it to one direct unit cost is the amount but in the case of like items for example it would just multiply your quantity by your direct unit cost to get the line amount in my case because it's all jail accounts I'll just keep this simple so I'll create you know a simple amount on each line description is optional because if you leave it blank it'll actually default from the description of the master data record so in this case if I don't put in a description it'll default the GL account name for this account number from the chart of accounts if it's a fixed asset or an item you'll get by default the fixed asset description or the item description but if you have a description obviously you can you can type it in and that would override whatever default the system would have put in there if you left it blank uh for a department and customer group I actually need to look up the available values so I'll quickly hop over to the dimensions page looks like the Departments can be Administration production sales and the customer group is large medium and small so for the Department just put an admin sales and maybe large and small for the customer group okay so again this is just my personal template that I've created but each individual user will decide which fields are relevant to them which Fields they want to use in their import and they can choose the ordering of the fields in their files so for example if I don't like the description here you know I could easily move it to wherever I want and the import will dynamically adjust to whatever template it sees in your file so that means different users can use different layouts or the same user can actually set up different templates depending on the types of invoices they want to import so maybe certain types of invoices you know I want to make sure I import a description and a quantity whereas maybe on other types of invoices I don't need those fields so I can actually maintain multiple templates for different types of invoices depending on what's more convenient for me and so this allows users to focus on the fields that are relevant to them in their import file without worrying about all the additional fields on the business Central application and if there's a custom field or some other non-standard field you'd like to use in your import just let us know and we can add it to the import so that it knows where to put your custom field on the invoice line so for example in the U.S localization of business Central there is a field on the invoice line called IRS 1099 liable whereas this field doesn't exist in other localizations and I know that in the British localization there are Vat fields that exist on the lines that don't exist in other localizations so if you want would like to import these fields that are either custom from a partner or from an extension that you've installed or maybe they only exist within your local area or your localization of business Central let us know and we can add that to the import so that you can use them as available Fields just like you could with any of the base fields that we've seen today so now that we have our import file filled in let's run the import in business Central so first thing I'll do is I'll save this I'll just save it as book one and then I'll close out of it and then when we hop back in business Central we just use the magnifying glass and I can run the purchase invoice import It'll ask you to select an Excel file so I'll do that with the Ellipsis button and then I have to click the choose button to select the file once I've selected the file I hit OK and it'll go through importing every single one I know that was really quick but I hope you're able to see that the import will show you a progress and it'll show the actual vendor invoice numbers being imported one by one so you can track the progress of your file if you have a very large file once it's done it'll say the import was successful and the number of lines that it imported so these nine Lines Just correspond to the same nine lines that we we created in our import file I'll hit OK and then if I hop over to the purchase invoice list we can see here are the three invoices that it created so I'll open up each one so the first one had three lines and you know you could see that for the first one we didn't enter a description so it got defaulted from the GL account name and the second two lines had descriptions along with our amounts and our Dimensions here at the end our second invoice had two lines so here are the two lines on the second invoice and the third invoice had another two lines so here's the third invoice and if I hop over to the purchase credit memo list we should see that there was a credit memo created with an additional two lines so as you can see this tool can be useful for organizations who enter more than 10 or 15 invoices into business Central every week because now you can create invoices in a few seconds versus a few hours and if there's additional functionality that you need for your specific business requirements that aren't part of the base purchase invoice import let us know and we can customize the add-on to work however you would like for your specific business requirements and if you want to see a live demo or ask any additional questions feel free to reach out to us at info lighthouseexperts.com