Microsoft Dynamics GP Implementation in Leasing
If your company is in leasing business and most of your revenue are based on monthly mortgage-style payments (principal and interest), such as commercial truck leasing, small specialized mortgages, industrial equipment rentals with leasing options, please see this small article, where we assume that your current (or proposed for implementation) Corporate ERP system is Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly also known as Great Plains Dynamics, eEnterprise or Great Plains Accounting
Similar functionality should be available in other mid-market and Small Business ERP applications,
such as SAP Business One, for example, but in our case we will be concentrating on Dynamics GP:
1. Receivable Management module Scheduled Payments. Leasing business logic is available in Great Plains out of the box. It is in RM module in the form of Scheduled Payments. If you are using demo version of GP, or if you have your system in production, please open Transactions -> Sales -> Scheduled Payment. Then pick one of the AR customer invoices to create Payment Schedule and see its Amortization with details about Interest due on the specific dates (for example monthly), Principal amount in the payment and remaining Principle
2. Finance Charges. Let's assume that your customer A paid monthly lease or mortgage with, say 10 days delay and you allow only one week (7 days) grace period. Now, seeing this scenario you have to assess finance charge, prior to applying customer payment to Scheduled Payment originated Invoice. If you apply it automatically - there is no reason for Dynamics GP to consider this customer as subject to Finance Charge (as technically you decided to apply check to invoice, meaning that you are probably OK with this delay in payment). If you still want to apply payment to invoice automatically, you need special custom report (good reporting tool would be Crystal Reports, SSRS), where you compare Apply date with Due date plus Grace period and if Payment is past due in that formulae, you show this customer, invoice, payment and dates in the report and then based on the report you manually generate Finance Charges in Dynamics GP
3. Interest, Principal Balance report. Probably you will need custom Crystal Reporting, showing you details about specific range of contracts (scheduled payment numbers). This report design is not really too challenging, you should just have it in your expectations
4. ePayments and internet self service for existing customers. It is always good idea to offer your customers internet self service (versus the old good days option to send you paper check), where customer could log in, see current invoice (and possibly finance charge or other sort of fee) and have the option to pay via Credit Card (nowadays CC are expensive, so you may decide to apply convenience fee), debit card or from specified bank account. You may decide to add something else and make your Dynamics GP ecommerce style web page more advanced, but we think that the idea is communicated
5. Feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, or email us help@albaspectrum.com
