Questions Accounts Payable Recurring Transactions

Hi Gonzo,

The first thing you need to do is take your latest recurring bill and enter it like you normally would, BUT DON'T RELEASE IT.

Leave it with a status of Balanced like this:

Then, you have two options.

Option #1

Choose ACTIONS -> Add to Schedule from the menu on the Bills And Adjustments screen like this:

This will take you to the Recurring Transactions screen and add the invoice to a new schedule for you automatically.

Personally, I don't like this option that much because it forces you to create a new schedule. Option #2 is more flexible because you can add an AP Bill to an existing schedule or create a new schedule.

Option #2

Just go to the Recurring Transactions screen, pull up an existing schedule or create a new schedule, and use the + icon on the bottom to add your invoice to the schedul like this:

As far as schedule options go, there are a few Schedule Type options

The first option is Daily where you can choose how many days until the schedule triggers again:

The second option is Weekly where you can choose how many weeks until the schedule triggers again and on what days of the week it will trigger:

The third option is Monthly where you can choose how many months until the schedule triggers again and on what day of the month it will trigger:

The fourth option is By Financial Period where you can choose how many periods until the schedule triggers again and whether it will trigger at the start (the first day), at the end (the last day), or on a fixed day of the period (for most companies, the financial period is a month anyways):

At the top you have the following options:

In the Description field you can put a description for your schedule. I would use it to describe how often this schedule will trigger.

Then there are Expiration Date and Execution Limit (Times) fields which you can use to set some kind of limit on this schedule. Either it will stop executing after a certain date (Expiration Date) or after executing a certain number of times (Execution Limit).

After you save your schedule, you can go back to the Accounts Payable Bill that you created in the beginning and you will see that the Status is now set to Scheduled and there is no way to RELEASE the document.

This document will be used as a template for all of your future Accounts Payable bills going forward.

Note: If you delete the AP Bill from the bottom of the Recurring Transactions screen using the X icon, it won't return to the Balanced status. Instead, it will get a Voided status and sit out there as a voided document forever.

Now, you have a schedule with an AP Bill in it. You can continue to add more AP Bills to this schedule.

When you are ready to run the schedule, you can press the RUN NOW button in the Recurring Transactions screen like this:

Or, you can go to the Generate Recurring Transactions screen, select the schedules that you want to run, and click the RUN button. Or just click the RUN ALL button to run all of the schedules. I prefer this screen because you can run all of the schedules at once. In the Recurring Transactions screen, you have to open one schedule at a time and click the RUN NOW button for each schedule.

Now, you might notice that our Schedule ID of 000022 isn't listed in the screenshot above. Why do you suppose that is? Well, the reason is that the schedule hasn't reached it's first trigger date of 12/01/2017. If we change the Execution Date to 12/01/2017, then we can see our 000022 schedule get listed below in the grid like this:

How did I know that it wouldn't get triggered until 12/01/2017? Well, you can actually see it in the Next Execution field on the Recurring Transactions screen like this:

Since my schedule was set to start on 11/13/2017 and to trigger at the start of a new financial period, it won't trigger next until 12/01/2017.

Last thing to point out is that, once you have run a schedule, the generated documents will appear in the GENERATED DOCUMENTS tab on the Recurring Transactions screen like this:

The documents will keep accumulating there as new ones are added each time the schedule runs. There are the documents that you will actually RELEASE and POST into the General Ledger.

But our 001189 document will always remain back on the DOCUMENT LIST tab with a status of Scheduled.

Solid. That's all I have to say. Solid.

When setting up a recurring AP transaction, is there an option to automatically mark it as paid (via credit card) so we don't have to apply payments every month?