Improving Electronic Payment Settlement using Payment Remittance Automation 

Financial environments are fast-paced, and there is a need for timely cash application. On top of that, customer payments are becoming increasingly electronic, showing up as ACH and wire statement lines on your daily bank statement. Many times, these electronic payments come with minimal accompanying information in the bank statement itself. Meanwhile, the information needed to settle those electronic payments to the correct invoices is buried in your email inbox as remittance advice. Until now, bringing these two pieces of information together has been manual and time consuming. In order to keep up, automation is a necessity to stay away from tedious manual entries. 

SKsoft’s Payment Remittance Automation combines the valuable remittance advice in your inbox with the payment information arriving in your bank statement to highly automate the electronic payment settlement process.  

SKsoft’s solution automates this task by using Tungsten Automation (formerly Kofax Optical Character Recognition (OCR)) to scan the image files and identify and store fields that are most common in remittance data such as payment amounts, dates, invoice numbers, customers, and customer accounts. The OCR engine monitors an email inbox and turns incoming remittance advice into data. Using the Treasury Automation Suite (TAS) and BankFabric, this remittance data is then transformed and stored in D365. 

When a bank statement line is imported and a statement line is identified as a customer payment, SKsoft’s Payment Remittance Automation then uses that stored remittance data to automatically generate the settlement information for that payment. 

Because SKsoft’s Payment Remittance Automation is embedded inside Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, the solution has the same look and feel as the D365 interface and helps your team avoid logging into disparate systems to simply match your payment remittances. This allows your accounting team to be more productive and precise. 

To support the automation BankFabric acts as the communication hub to push customer data to the OCR engine. This includes new customers and changes to existing customers. BankFabric and TAS are also used to pull the information from the OCR engine into D365 and transform the data into a proper format.  

Automating your payment remittance procedure calls for a high level of trust in the technology being used. After receiving the data from the OCR engine, the information gets sent back to D365 and through SKsoft’s Treasury Automation Suite (TAS). Through flexible configuration, TAS provides highly advanced matching and tolerance settings that can be configured and applied to the data so that the matching is precise. It can even catch discrepancies between amounts.  

Depending on the size of the discrepancy, you can set tolerance levels to account for amounts being off by a small amount. This flexibility ensures that payments are accurately matched and settled, reducing the need for manual intervention.  

The configuration also allows flexibility in determining which payments need manual intervention versus payments that processed straight through to posting.  

Automating the simple payment remittances that are exact matches is helpful, but often there are more complex scenarios. For example, if a customer routinely submits payments that need to be split across customers or invoices in multiple legal entities, the system can properly handle these payments and assign these payments to the correct legal entity. Additionally, if there is an overpayment or even a mismatch between the invoice and payment amount, the software allows for partial settlement and the creation of additional lines in D365 to handle the remainder in a simple fashion.  

There can, of course, be times where a payment remittance does not automatically match to a bank statement line. In those cases, Payment Remittance Automation allows you to quickly see the transactions that need manual intervention allowing you to focus on just the exceptions. For instance, there are filters to help you quickly identify payments that did not link to remittance advice, payments that did not fully settle, or payments that are complete but are not yet posted. The system also allows you to view the original image to help you settle the payment. With the ultimate goal to achieve a settled and posted payment inside of D365, you have the option to add journal lines to account for exchange rate variances or written off amounts.  

Payment Remittance Automation integrates seamlessly into SKsoft’s Bank Reconciliation. Because of this integration, when a payment is settled through the PRA process, it is automatically cleared in the Bank Reconciliation process as well.  

By automating remittance handling using SKsoft’s Payment Remittance Automation this integration ensures precise financial records, efficient reconciliation, and secure data handling, making it an essential tool for modern financial environments. Embedded directly in D365 Finance and Operations you can reduce time spent on manual data entry and enhance accuracy through advanced OCR technology and automated data flows. 

SKsoft is a leading Microsoft Dynamics ISV, providing solutions and expertise in Banking and Treasury Automation for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain, and Business Central. For 25+ years, SKsoft has pioneered the development of embedded banking and treasury automation software and is continuing to be a leader in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 channel.