Blog by Frederik Ahring Larsen – Consultant at AMC Banking
A fully automated payment process, where routine banking tasks happen with minimal manual intervention, is the goal for many finance teams.
While complete automation is not always realistic, a large part of the daily payment, bank statement and reconciliation workflow can be automated with AMC Banking in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.
The objective is not to remove finance teams from the process. It is to automate repetitive tasks so users can focus on approvals, exceptions and decisions that require human attention.
AMC Banking handles 3 main areas of cash management
- Payment processing
- Bank Statement imports and posting
- Bank Account Reconciliation
So, let’s take a deeper dive into what can be achieved in these areas with some batch jobs and some slight of hand.
Payment processing:
A typical payment process can involve several manual steps:
- Create a new journal for my payments
- Choose my bank
- Search out open invoices
- Look through it
- Validate it
- Resolve errors
- Approve the journal
- Send the payment to the bank
Many of these steps can be automated.
AMC Banking can use scheduled processes to create payment proposals based on defined criteria such as payment dates and filters.
The system can automatically create journals and separate payment lines containing errors into another journal for further review.
AMC Banking can also select the relevant payment type based on configured logic and select the appropriate bank account according to the priority setup.
Instead of manually completing the full process, the finance team can focus on two primary tasks:
- Review and approve payments that are ready to be sent
- Handle the exceptions that require attention
This changes the role of the finance team from processing every transaction to managing the payments that actually require human judgement.
The Create and add vendor payments batch job allows users to define parameters such as which payments should be selected, when the process should run, how often it should run and how errors should be handled.
Automating bank statement imports
Bank statements are another area where manual work can be reduced.
Depending on the bank connectivity and AMC Banking setup, bank files can be imported through direct communication.
With an AMC Banking Enterprise setup, bank statement imports can also be automated through scheduled processes using a dedicated XTendLink service.
This makes it possible for bank statements to be available in Dynamics 365 Finance before the finance team begins its daily work.
The system can then run automatic matching and, where configured, process transactions that are ready for posting.
The result is a workflow where users primarily need to review transactions that could not be matched automatically.
For example, this could include:
- customers paying more or less than the invoiced amount
- missing or incorrect payment references
- transactions requiring additional review
Instead of spending time processing every bank transaction, the finance team can concentrate on exceptions.
Automating bank account reconciliation
Bank account reconciliation should require as little manual work as possible when the necessary transaction data is available.
The level of automation depends partly on the bank statement information used in the process and how transactions are posted in Dynamics 365 Finance.
Two important questions are:
- Are CAMT.053 account statements used as the basis for posting?
- How does the bank handle fees and other transactions?
Traditionally, payment specification files such as CAMT.054 have often been used as the basis for posting vendor or customer payments because they can contain detailed transaction information.
However, CAMT.053 account statements can also contain detailed information about individual transactions.
Using the account statement as the basis for both posting and reconciliation can create a more consistent process.
For example, the statement may contain transactions such as:
- bank fees
- salary payments
- tax payments
- customer payments
- vendor payments
These transactions can then be handled through configured matching and search rules.
Why using the same transaction source matters
Reconciliation becomes easier when the transactions used for posting are based on the same bank statement data used to reconcile the bank account.
If every relevant bank transaction is represented correctly in the posting process, Dynamics 365 Finance can automatically reconcile a much larger part of the account activity.
The finance team then only needs to investigate situations where something does not match as expected.
This could include:
- missing transactions
- manually deleted entries
- incorrect postings
- unexpected bank fees
- transactions without sufficient matching information
Where separate payment specification files must be used, the reconciliation process may require additional handling depending on how the bank provides fees and other account transactions.
Automation should focus attention on exceptions
The goal of payment automation is not necessarily to achieve a completely touchless process.
It is to remove unnecessary manual steps from routine transactions.
With the right setup, AMC Banking can automate much of the daily workflow around:
- payment proposals
- payment journals
- validation
- bank statement imports
- transaction matching
- bank account reconciliation
Finance teams can then spend less time creating journals, importing files and matching transactions manually, and more time reviewing exceptions and improving financial processes.
A more efficient banking workflow in Dynamics 365 Finance
The most effective automation comes from connecting the individual banking processes rather than treating payments, statements and reconciliation as separate tasks.
Payments are created and validated in Dynamics 365 Finance. Bank information is returned and imported. Transactions are matched, and the resulting data is used for reconciliation.
The closer these processes are connected, the less manual handling is required.
AMC Banking is designed to support this workflow so finance teams can focus on the transactions that genuinely require attention rather than repeatedly processing routine banking tasks.
Ready to automate more of your banking processes?
See how AMC Banking can help automate payments, bank statements and reconciliation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.
Explore AMC Banking for Dynamics 365 Finance
One change I made deliberately: I removed the old “90% of all banks” statement. Unless you have documentation supporting that number, it is an unnecessary factual risk and the argument works without it.