Payments

Payment schedules contain details of scheduled payments which will arise out of contract, order or request agreements.

Example:

Payments in this context represent individual payments which are due at any given time. For instance, a payment schedule indicating that €100 be paid from June 1st, 2013 every month for a period of 24 months would correspond to 24 individual payments of €100 each due on the first of each month, finishing on May 1st, 2015. These individual payments can then be compared with incoming invoices, approved for payment, queried, postponed etc.

Valuemation offers the possibility to generate individual payments on the basis of the information contained in the corresponding payment schedule. To accommodate the different approaches to the process, various options are provided to achieve the desired result.

Upload payments settings are made in three steps:

1. Specify the method of uploading
   • Manual Method: When 'Manual' is selected, individual payments from payment schedules will have to be generated (uploaded) manually. In this case all other settings in the 'Upload Payments Configuration' page are irrelevant and thus disabled.
   • Automatic Method: When 'Automatic' is selected, payments will be automatically generated whenever payment schedules are created. Using the settings in the 'Upload Payments Configuration' page, the administrator can specify the business object types (Order, Request, Contract) for which payments are to be generated. Any combination of contracts, orders and requests is possible, the selection will depend on the extent of Valuemation business functionality used. Uploading orders and requests, for instance, would normally only be used in order to obtain projected values for budget planning and analysis.
   • Batch Method: When 'Batch' is selected, the 'Run Batch' button is enabled and the upload can be started in batch mode.

     The payments generation process may be rather time demanding. Using the Batch Method it is possible to run the process on another computer referred to as an escalation server. An escalation server is a computer running Valuemation started with the escalation option. The escalation server is identified by an IP address which is stored in the 'EscalationAgent.properties' file. To run payment generation on a particular computer, you should change the 'serverIpAddress' parameter in the 'EscalationAgent.properties' to its IP address.

     The parameters influencing the actual payment generation process are those set in Global Options: Payments. The Run Batch button starts a .bat file called 'EscAgentPaymentUpload.BAT'. This file serves to run batch upload payments on the above mentioned escalation server.

2. Upload Payments for

   Payments are associated with several Valuemation object types. In this section you can select the object type(s) for which payments will be uploaded: Contracts, Orders and/or Requests.

3. Specify the time interval to be considered for the payment upload

   The two fields 'Date From' and 'Date To' can be used to specify the beginning and end of the time period. For instance, if a user reviews the invoices on a monthly basis, he could upload the scheduled payments for a particular month.

   Alternatively, the user can select 'Complete Duration'. This option disables the Date From and Date To fields and uploads payments for the entire duration of the Contract (or order / requirement) regardless of individual beginning or finish dates.

4. Specify which payments should be overwritten by the upload operation

   The generated payment has a default initial value of „Generated“ when the Upload operation completes. The payments having one of the status values listed will be overwritten by the Upload operation. Payments having other status values will be left unchanged. For instance, if a payment has already been approved or rejected, the user can specify that the payment should not be reset to the initial default value again.

   Click the 'Add Status' button to open a list of status values for selection of statuses to be overwritten. Click the 'Remove Status' button to remove required status values from the list.