Scheduled payments

Scheduled Payments can split transactions in Debtor, Creditor and Client account types. The relevant transaction lines are split during Ledger Entry (LEN) and Ledger Import (LIM).

Using scheduled payments, you can automate the task of staging creditor payments or debtor collections, and this is especially useful in countries where it is common practice to pay invoices in instalments. For example, a creditor may require an invoice to be paid in twelve monthly instalments. You need only enter the invoice as one transaction in Ledger Entry, then, depending on the details of the schedule you configure, the system automatically splits the invoice line into twelve individual transaction lines. You can check the transaction split generated before you post the journal.

You define a split by percentages, which must always add to as near 100 as possible, and set the Rounding Amounts option to determine whether the any remainder amount due to rounding is added to the first or last instalment. In the above example, each instalment would have a percentage of 8.333.

The combination of percentages and due date information on the Payments Schedule record determines how the debtor or creditor transaction line is split; specifically the number of split lines (instalments) to generate, their due dates, and the amount for each instalment.

You can choose to either overwrite originating transaction lines, or to preserve them (thus creating the split lines separately). If you overwrite the original line, it is replaced by the first instalment of the split. However, if you choose to preserve it, then a reversal line is created. In this case, both the original and the reversal line are marked with the Correction allocation marker, and all of the split lines are created separately. All of the lines within the journal are then renumbered so that the line numbers for each reference are held consecutively together. The option to either preserve or overwrite the original transaction lines must be set for the entire ledger, using the Preserve original line values option on the Transaction Rules tab of the Ledger Setup (LES).

Once you have created a scheduled payments record, you attach it to a payment terms group record which must in turn be attached to a customer or supplier record.