Avril Howes, VP of Innovation and Business Applications ISV at Braintree.
A business can run Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and still manage some of its most important trade processes in Excel, e-mail and personal notes. A creditors controller receives a supplier statement, compares it with the ledger, finds a difference and starts an e-mail trail. A debtors controller keeps a separate list of who promised to pay and when. Neither process is unusual, and neither is visible to anyone outside the person running it.
The difficulty is that this work becomes hard to see, control and audit the moment it sits outside the ERP. Finance cannot say with confidence what is genuinely owed to suppliers. Management sees an aged debt figure without the collection activity behind it. Auditors struggle to follow the reconciliation work. Supplier relationships suffer when valid payments are held up or disputed amounts are never formally recorded.
Vendor reconciliation is usually where a finance team feels this first. A reconciliation compares what the supplier says is owed with the entries in the creditor ledger, and it is the basis for deciding what to pay. The two views rarely match. The business may have paid an invoice the supplier has not processed. The supplier may have issued an invoice that was never captured. There may be an unresolved dispute over damaged goods, oversupply, incorrect pricing or a rebate. Both parties make mistakes. What matters is being able to explain the difference before a payment goes out.
Braintree Trade Assistant adds four modules to Business Central to keep that work inside the system: Vendor Reconciliations, Debtors Collection Management, Forward Exchange Contracts and Landed Cost. They are available individually or as a suite. The first two are where most finance and credit control teams start.
Book a Trade Assistant process review with Braintree here
The vendor reconciliation module matches supplier statements against entries processed through accounts payable. A team can load the unsettled creditor entries, import the supplier statement from Excel, match it line by line, add statement documents missing from the ledger, flag a disputed entry with its reason, apply deductions for withholding tax, supplier faults or rebates, then calculate the payment and e-mail the reconciliation and payment advice. The gain is not only faster processing. It is a documented position that a procurement manager, a financial manager and an auditor can all read the same way.
The debtor book has the same visibility problem in a different form. Most credit controllers know their overdue accounts well, and that is the risk, because the knowledge sits with one person. If that person is absent or carrying too many accounts, follow-ups are missed and promises to pay go unrecorded. Debtors Collection Management puts a dashboard of accounts, balances and ageing inside Business Central, and lets a user create a collection note at customer level that holds the interactions, the reason for non-payment, the next follow-up date and the invoices behind the balance.
Finance leaders weighing this up can start with five checks on work their teams already do:
- Reconciliation frequency. Establish how often active supplier accounts are reconciled, and whether a completed reconciliation can be produced on request.
- The payment trail. Take one recent supplier payment and ask the team to show the reconciliation, the disputes, the deductions and the payment advice without rebuilding the history from e-mail.
- Collection continuity. Check whether another authorised user could pick up a customer account today and see the last interaction, the stated reason for non-payment and the next agreed date.
- Action behind the ageing. An aged debt report shows the amount outstanding. It does not show whether anyone is working on it. Review both.
- Single-record spreadsheets. Not every spreadsheet is a problem. The one that is the only record of a supplier dispute, a payment decision or a customer commitment is.
The modules structure the work, but they do not do it. A reconciliation only helps if it is completed regularly. A collection note only improves cashflow if the follow-up call happens. The system provides the shared record. The operating discipline stays with the business.
Braintree works with finance and credit control teams to map how supplier statements are reconciled, how payments are prepared and how collection activity is recorded, then configures the modules that fit. Book a Trade Assistant process review with Braintree here.
