Case study
One of our customers contacted us with a request to initiate their transfers from Indecs. Whether it was to paysupplier invoices, legal fees or even to return an overpayment to the debtor.
They truly wanted to be in control of dozens of different costs from hundreds of partners.
Together we started to work out a solution and after a few months we introduced the payment requests module. From then on, our client had a firm grip on his cash flow, knowing weeks in advance exactly when, how muchmoney and to whom he would need to transfer it. Soon he was able to entrust all his bank transfers, except for salaries, to Indecs, because the software gave him such strong control.
What are the payment requests?
The Payment Requests module is built around a process that works without the Indecs Workflow module. The essence of the process is:
✔ Initiating payments
✔ Verification of payments
✔ Approval of payments
✔ Sending the payments to the banking software
✔ Then checking on the statements that the payments have been made correctly
Supplier invoices
One of the strengths of Indecs is the recording of supplier and customer invoices, which will be discussed later.
From the point of view of payment requests, it is important that from the invoice data sheet, you can start the payment request, in other words the process of settling the supplier invoice, with the click of a button.
Legal costs
Sometimes we do not have to pay traditional supplier invoices, but for example advance payments for bailifffees, based on a fee schedule. These costs can also be recorded in the legal proceedings data sheet, without the other obligatory details of the supplier invoices. From here, too, the payment of legal costs can be initiated at the push of a button.
Refunds
No matter how attentive our collections colleagues are, sooner or later overpayments will appear and need to be refunded to customers as soon as possible. Refunding overpayments is also very simple and can be done fromthe case data sheet.
The verification step
Payment requests should always be checked professionally by someone before they are passed on. The verifier is usually a member of the finance staff. Once this person has reconciled the data, he/she will release the paymentrequests if everything is in order. If there is an error, the payment request is sent back to the initiatingadministrator.
The approval step
All payment requests that are accurately and well recorded must be finally approved by a business decision maker. Once this has been done, it is then up to the finance staff to ensure that the payments are made.
Export to bank terminal
Indecs can generate transfer files for a number of bank terminals.
From the list of payment requests, you can select the deadline and priority of the expenses you want to transfer, or even specify that you want to pay as many expenses as possible up to a certain limit, sorted by expiry date.
Once the list has been generated, a bank transfer file is created in the format required by your account-holding bank.
Identifying payments on bank statements
Indecs includes the payment request identifier (in a clearly recognisable but concise way) in each transfermessage. Once the daily bank statement is loaded, the system automatically identifies the items that belong to an Indecs initiated expense payment and sets them to “paid verified” status. There is no possibility of any mix-up: the bank statements read back are always correct. If the payment has not been received (e.g. the bank account number has been deleted), the payment process for the cost cannot be completed.
Benefits of the Payment Requests module
In summary, the benefits of the module are:
- handles any kind of payment: supplier invoice, legal costs, other payments (e.g. refunds)
- a strict process with financial and professional controls
- can create a transfer file for many banking software
- always checks if the payment was successful