Today in the interconnected business world, one of the critical and most important processes is integrating capabilities with other systems securely. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are prepared to provide all technical support that guarantees both incoming and outgoing communication through Electronic Documents.
Microsoft offers a list of Standard Electronic Formats that allow your company to transfer or exchange information electronically with governments, banks, and other third parties.
Throughout this blog, I will show you the benefits of setting up Electronic Payment integration and the minimum requirements used in our previous successful business cases.
In conjunction with our team, we implemented integrations within our clients’ environments and various banks located in different countries such as the U.S., Denmark, London, and Norway, developing the proper configuration and determining the security behind this transactional process in an easy and familiar way.
The most common reason all companies are moving into digital communication, within all aspects, including bank movements, is efficiency. Electronic communication represents lower costs and more productivity; the user can submit all payments directly from Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to your Bank Partner to be processed, avoiding back and forth with different platforms, risking your sensitive data in the user’s devices.
One of our clients used to handle all payments directly in the bank platform, so the Accounts Payable Clerk had to enter the payment transaction and approve it twice. Daily, one user could dedicate four hours processing those transactions one by one. After we implemented the Electronic Payment feature with the standard formats, the same user just spends one hour in one journal with all payments together, approving and submitting transactions to the bank in one shot. This client handles, on average, 80 electronic transactions per day that do not need to be confirmed separately since the integration will take care of it.
The essential feature that our clients are looking for is implementing bank integrations based on the High-Security Standard Setup to prevent that no one in your company or the bank site can manipulate the sent information. We have implemented two different security methods; the first one is communication through an SFTP site (Security File Transfer Protocol); this method uses the password configuration in both locations, Dynamics 365 and the bank, allowing the connection. In terms of process, the Accounts Payable Clerk enters the Payment Journal within Dynamics 365 and submits the Payment; this process automatically generates the File that will be read and processed for your Bank Partner.
The second one is based on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which encrypts the File when it is generated, and the bank is the only one that has the key to decrypt it to be processed. PGP is a High-Security Level; not even the IT users with access to the FTP server connection could see or manipulate the information in the File.
As long as there are different Methods of Payment and different Standard Formats, this integration will be able to set them up in the way your functional accountant needs directly in Dynamics 365 Finance. One of our clients in Denmark needs to handle eight different Methods of Payment using the same Electronic Integration due to the legal localization requirements. The payments need to be separated if they are in different currencies: Local (Denmark), EU, or abroad.
For this scenario, we break down all methods of payments by specifying their behaviors within the Master Record in Dynamics 365. That allows our client to generate the Payment proposal based on a particular Method of Payment and submit the File to the bank (as the bank requests it) without entering it manually.
In conclusion, depending on the format and the technical conditions, this process could have some variations; however, downloading, configuring, and updating your own reports was never simpler.
Electronic Reporting makes it easier to interconnect with third-party systems and creates secure communication back and forth with your solution in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
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