Back to V300: Project Accounting for Construction

Lesson 16: Preparing Payments for Projects

Part 4: Payments

This lesson describes how to use a single payment to pay multiple bills for a project.

Vendor Payments for a Project: General Information

To pay for services provided by a vendor for a particular project in Acumatica ERP, you need to create an AP payment, which is a document that represents the payment in the system, and apply it to the corresponding AP bill or bills.

Learning Objectives

In this lesson, you will learn how to do the following:

Select the bills or bill lines to be paid
Prepare and release a payment for multiple bills for the same project

Applicable Scenarios

You may need to prepare and process a vendor payment for a project in Acumatica ERP when the vendor’s bill is due or multiple bills of this vendor related to the project are due on the same date. Also, when you prepare the payment, you may need to do one the following:

Pay multiple bills for a project with a single payment document
Pay particular lines of multiple bills with a single payment document
Pay multiple bills at the same time and prepare separate payment documents for some of these bills and a consolidated payment document for the rest of the bills

To speed the process of preparing and processing payments for a project, you initiate the payment process on the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form. In the Selection area of the Prepare Payments form, you select the project for which you want to list bills for possible payment generation. You can also filter the listed bills by payment date, cash account, payment method, vendor, and discount availability. Then in the table on the Documents to Pay tab, you select the bills to be paid (the system inserts the full balance in the Amount Paid column, but you can instead specify a partial one to be paid), and click Process on the form toolbar to generate the payments for the selected bills.

          If you need to process a payment for one bill, you can manually create a payment on the Checks
          and Payments (AP302000) form and process this payment to completion. For more information on
          creating a payment for a particular bill, see AP Bill Payments: General Information.

The system generates an AP payment (or multiple payments grouped by the vendor) for the selected bills. If the payment method specified in any of the processed AP payments requires a check to be printed, the system opens the Process Payments / Print Checks (AP505000) form with these payments listed; on this form, you select the payments for which the checks should be printed and click Process on the form toolbar. Then on the Release Payments (AP505200) form, you mass-release the AP payments. The system releases the AP payments, applies the payment amount to the corresponding bill or bills, and decreases the open balance of these bills. Once the payment amount is applied in full, the payment is assigned the Closed status.

Workflow of the Process of Paying Bills for a Project

The following diagram illustrates the workflow of processing payments for vendors’ bills related to a project.

Payment for Separate Bill Lines for a Project

If your company needs to manage expenses and payments at a granular level, you can configure payment by
document lines. If the Payment Application by Line feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000)
form, you select the Pay by Line check box in the Summary area of the Bills and Adjustments (AP301000) form to
indicate that individual lines of the bill can be paid. For more information, see Applying Payments to Particular Lines
of AP Documents.
You can use the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form to process bill lines just as you use it to process bills. You start
by specifying selection criteria, which can include the vendor and the project, for the bills and bill lines to be listed.
You can prepare and process payments that include both bills and individual bill lines. On the Documents to Pay
tab of this form, bills or bill lines are listed for each included document, depending on the state of the Pay by Line
check box of the Bills and Adjustments form:

For each bill or retainage document for which the check box is cleared, the system displays one aggregated line. If you have selected a project in the Selection area of the current form and at least one line in the bill or retainage document contains the project, the document appears in the table as an aggregated line with the total amount for all lines of the bill.
For each bill for which the check box is selected, the system displays individual bill lines. On the Documents to Pay tab of the Prepare Payments form, you select the bills and individual lines for which you need to process payments and specify the amount to be paid for each bill or line. Then you click Process on the form toolbar to generate the AP payment or payments. Aer that, you release each AP payment and payment application on the Release Payments (AP505200) form; the system updates the open balances of the lines to which each payment was applied. When the payment is applied in full, it is assigned the Closed status.

Workflow of the Process of Paying Bill Lines for a Project

The following diagram illustrates the workflow of processing payment for individual bill lines related to a vendor’s
work on a project.

Preparation of Separate Payments

When you mass-create payments for multiple bills or bill lines of a project on the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form, the system groups the prepared accounts payable payments by vendor. That is, a separate AP payment is created for all bills and bill lines of the same vendor. If the Pay Separately check box is selected for a vendor on the Payment tab of the Vendors (AP303000) form, however, each vendor document is paid with a separate payment. If you want to prepare a separate AP payment for a specific bill, select the Pay Separately check box in the line of the Documents to Pay tab on the Prepare Payments form. When you process multiple bills at a time, the system prepares a separate AP payment for each document that has the Pay Separately check box selected, and a consolidated payment for the rest of the documents of the same vendor selected for processing. When you prepare a payment for multiple bill lines at a time, if the Pay Separately check box is selected for at least one bill line, the system prepares a separate AP payment for this bill and includes in this AP payment all the bill lines that have been selected for processing. For the remaining bill lines and bills selected for processing that have this check box cleared and have the same vendor, the system creates a consolidated payment. Vendor Payments for a Project: To Process a Payment of Bill Lines

This activity will walk you through the generation of a payment for particular bill lines related to a project and the application of this payment to bills.

Story

Suppose that the ToadGreen company is building a hotel for the Equity Group Investors customer; the ToadGreen project manager has created a project to handle the tracking and billing of the materials and services related to the hotel. On January 15, 2025, the ToadGreen company purchased 500 packages of concrete mix and 100 units of plastic pipes from the Standard Hardware Company vendor for the hotel being built. On January 17, 2025, the company also hired this vendor as a subcontractor to perform on-site work, which is broken into three phases. On January 30, 2025, the concrete mix was delivered, and the first phase of the on-site work was performed. The ToadGreen project accountant entered into the system two bills received from the Standard Hardware Company: one (with a date of 1/15/2025) for all of the purchased materials, and another (with a date of 1/17/2025) for all three phases of the on-site work. Acting as the ToadGreen project manager, you need to prepare a payment for the materials and services that have been provided—that is, you will pay only particular lines of the bills.

Configuration Overview

In the U100 dataset, the following tasks have been performed to support this activity:

On the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form, the following features have been enabled:
Payment Application by Line
Construction
On the Projects (PM301000) form, the HOTEL project has been created for the Equity Group Investors customer, and multiple project tasks have been created for the project.
On the Non-Stock Items (IN202000) form, the LABOR, CONCRMX and PROJMATERIAL non-stock items have been configured.
On the Vendors (AP303000) form, the HARDCO vendor has been created. For this vendor, the CHECK payment method is specified as the default one; also, the Pay by Line check box is selected on the Payment tab.
On the Bills and Adjustments (AP301000) form, two bills for the materials and labor provided by HARDCO (one for the materials and one for the labor) have been entered and released. Both bills have the Pay By Line check box selected in the Summary area of the form.

Process Overview

You will find the bills related to the needed project and requiring payment on the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form. Then you will prepare a single payment for particular lines of these bills. Finally, you will print the check on the Process Payments / Print Checks (AP505000) form and will release the payment on the Release Payments (AP505200) form.

System Preparation

To prepare to perform the instructions of the activity, do the following:

Sign in to the system as a project accountant by using the bsanchez username and the 123 password.
In the info area, in the upper-right corner of the top pane of the Acumatica ERP screen, make sure that the business date in your system is set to 1/30/2025. If a diﬀerent date is displayed, click the Business Date menu button and select 1/30/2025 on the calendar. For simplicity, in this activity, you will create and process all documents in the system on this business date.

Step 1: Selecting the Bills to be Paid To select the bills to be paid, do the following:

Open the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form.
In the Summary area of the form, specify the following selection criteria to filter the data shown in the table:

Branch: TBGROUP (inserted by default)
Payment Method: CHECK
Cash Account: 10200TG - ToadGreen Checking Account
Payment Date: 1/30/2025
Vendor: HARDCO
Pay Date Within 7 Days In the table, the system lists the lines of the two bills of the HARDCO vendor: two lines for materials and three lines for services.

Select the unlabeled check box in the row with the CONCRMX item of the first bill, and in the row with the LABOR item and a Line Nbr. of 1 of the second bill (which is the first part of the works that have been performed and needs to be paid for). Make sure the Selection Total in the Summary area is $50,000. Also, make sure that the Available Balance is enough to pay this amount.

Step 2: Preparing the Payments To prepare the payments, do the following:

While you are still on the Prepare Payments (AP503000) form with the needed rows selected, click Process on the form toolbar.

On the Process Payments / Print Checks (AP505000) form, which opens, click Process to process the only selected line, which corresponds to the prepared payment. The system opens a printable version of the check.

                For the purposes of this activity, you do not need to actually print the document. In a
                production setting, you would click Print on the form toolbar to print the check before closing
                the browser tab.

Close the printable check and return to the Release Payments (AP505200) form, that the system has opened. On the form, notice that the system has added a row with the payment and selected the unlabeled check box in the row.
On the form toolbar, click Process to release the AP payment.
In the Processing dialog box, which is opened, click the Processed tab, and in the table, click the link in the Reference Nbr. column in the only line to open the payment on the Checks and Payments (AP302000) form.
On the Application History tab of the Checks and Payments form, make sure both bill lines to which the payment has been applied are listed in the table, as shown in the following screenshot. The payment amount has been applied in full, so the payment is now assigned the Closed status. Figure: Single payment applied to lines of two bills
You have prepared a payment for particular bill lines and applied this payment to these lines.

Vendor Payments for a Project: Generated Transactions

When an AP payment is released, a batch of general ledger transactions is created; the generated transactions reduce the balances of the cash account used for the payment and the vendor's accounts payable account.

Account               Source of Ac-         Project               Debit                            Credit
                      count

Cash account          Vendor                X (non-project        0.00                             Payment amount
                                            code)

Accounts Payable      Vendor                X (non-project        Payment amount                   0.00
                                            code)

You can view the reference number of the GL batch on the Financial tab of the Checks and Payments (AP302000) form.