Overview
The progress payment functionality allows you to post multiple deposits against a sales or purchase order. The amount of the deposit payment can be any amount you want instead of a percentage. When the invoices are posted, you can choose whatever dollar amount to be applied to each posting of the order. This means that the deposit you paid does not necessarily need to correspond to the prepayment invoices you posted.
The progress payment allows users to have an easier time setting up payment schedules based on project milestones or specific contract stages. This is particularly useful for businesses involved in construction, manufacturing, or project-based services where payments are tied to project progress.
Users can define the terms of each milestone payment, including the percentage of completion required to trigger a payment, the due date, and the payment amount. This flexibility allows for customized payment schedules that align with the project’s requirements.
What’s Wrong with the Standard Prepayment Functionality?
Quite simply, it’s too restrictive. We often hear complaints from users not using prepayment functionality because of the transactions that are needed for it to almost work.
When you post a prepayment invoice, you cannot change the lines under any circumstance. This doesn’t work in the majority of customers that require prepaying for their goods. Changing the amounts on a prepaid order also causes havoc on the percentage of prepayments the system is checking for.
What ends up happening is a million credit memos, re-do invoices, creative changes, etc. Until finally, the user gives up and just tracks their prepayment on orders in Excel.
Conclusion
We created the Progress Payment functionality in Dynamics 365 Business Central to simplify the management of payments tied to project milestones or contract stages. Because no one has time for re-do prepayment invoices, getting the proper prepayment percentages, and getting the stars aligned so they can record the deposits made to a vendor or prepayments received from customer.
Here’s a quick video on how the Progress Payment Functionality works:
