About AP advances

Create an AP advance when you need to make a payment to a supplier in advance of receiving goods or services, where there's no existing AP supplier invoice. Retainer fees, customer order deposits, and down payments are all good examples of when you might want to create an advance. Advances are usually posted to an established prepayment account, as defined in your Accounts Payable configuration, but you can override the account when creating the advance.

After you pay the advance, it automatically becomes available as a credit on the supplier account. You can apply the credit to AP supplier invoices you receive from the same supplier, using the Pay AP supplier invoices page.

AP advances workflow

The process of creating and applying an advance follows this general workflow:

1. You create an advance.

2. Sage Intacct automatically creates a payment request for the advance.

3. You complete payment, as appropriate to the payment method you chose.

4. Sage Intacct makes the amount available as a credit.

5. You apply the credit when using Pay AP supplier invoices to pay a AP supplier invoice from this supplier.

Approvals and the workflow

If you have payment approvals enabled for your company, the payment request associated with each advance is subject to the payment approval process. You can tell if you have approvals enabled because the options when you create the advance are to save it as a draft or submit it for approval.

Submitted advances have a state of Pending approval, while the associated payment request has a payment status of Submitted. If the payment request requires multiple approvals, both the advance state and the payment status show Partially approved when awaiting additional approvals.

If a payment request is not approved, the advance state is set to Declined. You can edit declined advances and resubmit, which sends the payment request back through the approval process.

If you do not use payment approvals, or if the total payment amount is less than the minimum amount required for approval, the payment request is automatically approved. If the payment method is cheque, the advance state is set to In process. For record transfer, cash, and credit card payments, the advance state is set to Advance paid.

Payment methods and the workflow

After the payment request is approved, or in cases where approval is not required, the advance state depends on the payment method.

Payments managed outside of Sage Intacct

Record transfer (EFT and manual cheques), cash, and credit card payments are all payment methods where the transfer of funds is managed outside of Intacct. You do not need to take any action within Intacct to complete these payments.

When payment requests with these methods are approved, the payments are immediately posted. The advance state changes to Advance paid and the payment status changes Complete. The payment request moves to the Posted payments page.

Payments managed within Sage Intacct

Cheque and Bank file payments require action on your part to complete the payment. For these advances, when the payment request is approved, the advance state changes to In process and the payment status changes to Approved.

Paying using these methods requires two steps.

• Step 1: Changes the payment status for the associated payment request to Delivered. The advance state remains In Process.

• Step 2: Changes the payment status to Complete and the advance state to In Process. The credit is now available in Pay AP supplier invoices.

Workflow step	Cheque payment	Bank file payment	ACH payment
Step 1: To move the payment request status to Delivered	Print the cheque from the Print Cheques page.	Generate and download the bank file in the Cash Management application.	Generate the ACH file in the Cash Management application. If you're using a NACHA-compliant bank file, follow the procedures for bank files.
Step 2: To complete payment and move the advance state to Advance paid	Confirm the cheque on the Print Cheques page.	Upload the file to the bank portal and confirm it.	Confirm and post the ACH file.

Tracking advances

At any time, you can view the state of all advances on the AP advances page. As with other list pages, such as the AP supplier invoices list, you can create on-the-fly filters to answer questions or create custom views to address your typical queries.

View an advance to view an at-a-glance summary header, detailed information about the advance, a list of AP supplier invoices to which the advance was applied, posting details, payment request history, and the audit trail.