You probably already know that you can email invoices directly from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with its seamless integration with Outlook. But the integrations don’t stop there. Did you know that you can take it a step further by accepting electronic payments using Microsoft Pay or PayPal? Do you know how easy it is to modify the look and feel of your invoices using Microsoft Word?
Accepting Payment with PayPal or Microsoft Pay
Emailing invoices to your customers that have an embedded link to pay online might be the saving grace for your AR team. It’s a simple, intuitive integration that gives you (and your customers) more options.
From Microsoft: “As an alternative to collecting payments through bank transfer or credit cards, you can offer your customers to pay you through their PayPal account. When you send a sales invoice or sales order by email, there is a PayPal link in the email body and in the attached PDF document. When the customer chooses the link, the service page for their PayPal account appears showing the payment details for the sale. The customer can then pay the invoice as any other PayPal payment.” The same thing can be done with Microsoft Pay and an embedded link.
Give your customers more options of ways to pay you. Credit cards and ACH are other methods of payment you can easily accept in Dynamics 365 Business Central (reach out to us if you’d like to know more about those). Since the extensions add the links to your sales documents by default, you just need to make sure the rest of the document displays how you’d like. This is easy to do using Microsoft Word.
Modify an Invoice Using Word
Let’s walk through an example of modifying your sales invoice in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
As part of Microsoft’s 365 platform, Dynamics 365 Business Central has a tight integration with Microsoft Word. You can’t modify a check using Word (yet!), but you can easily modify a sales invoice.
Note: if you’re hesitant about making changes in the system, you can try things out in your Sandbox environment. All Dynamics 365 Business Central subscriptions come with a free Sandbox so you can test out all your changes without impacting production. Then, once you’re comfortable, you can roll those changes out into your live environment. (As always, contact us for help with this!)
Select “Custom Report Layouts” in Dynamics 365 Business Central and filter for the Word-compatible layouts:
Select the sales invoice, and make a copy of it so you don’t modify the original just yet. Choose “Export Layout” to open it in Word. Now you can add your company logo, change font colors, or add additional fields of data. Changing fonts and other typical editing tasks are performed in Word. To add data fields, choose the Developer tab in Word and select the fields from the XML Schema. If you don’t see the Developer menu, select File > Option > Customize Ribbon and add it.
Save the Word document. Then, back in Dynamics 365 Business Central, import the file back in as a Custom Report Layout. Select “run report” to see your changes take effect first in the “Copy” version of your report.
Now, you’re on your way to invoicing customers with the look and feel you want, leveraging the Outlook integration to perform a task that would be cumbersome otherwise, and providing your customers with a link to a trusted site where they can submit electronic payment – offering more to your customers by breaking down payment barriers, and ultimately getting paid faster.
If you have questions about modifying invoices or need some assistance, visit our support page for more help.
