Payment Groups overview—Accounts Receivable

Received payments are batched into payment groups so you always have a record of payments entered into Sage Intacct. The payments listed in a payment group include payments that your company has received from customers regardless of the payment method.

Overview

Payment groups are different from regular AR summaries. Payment groups are collections of payments that you receive from customers, such as AR sales invoice payments, grouped together for processing. Until you or Intacct creates a new summary, no line items appear in the  Payment groups list page.

Payment groups are created in two ways.

  • Automatically, by the Intacct system at intervals you configure.
  • Manually, such as payment groups you create to handle specific situations.

Automatic payment groups

Intacct automatically creates payment groups for items such as AR sales invoice payments so that a summary always exists for payments as they are entered throughout the day. These payment groups are created according to preselected time intervals that you configure in Accounts Receivable. You cannot edit automatic payment groups.

Intacct standardizes the date format for all automatically created payment groups on the internationally accepted format of YYYY-MM-DD24:MI:SS. Standardizing the date format in the payment group title ensures that transactions are always grouped or matched to the appropriate payment group. This format helps to eliminate the risk of posting errors due to a date format mismatch.

Manual payment groups

When Accounts Receivable is configured to create User-specified payment groups, payment groups are manually created anytime a user receives an AR sales invoice payment. You can also manually create a payment group to handle specific situations.

Configuration

To configure Accounts Receivable payment groups, go to Accounts Receivable > Setup > Configuration > Account settings > Summary frequency. Use the dropdown to configure how payment groups are created for each payment type.

Option Description
Payments frequency

One per payment

Automatically create a payment group with each payment.

Daily

Automatically create a payment group at the end of each day.

Monthly

Automatically create a payment group at the end of each month.

User-specified

Manually create a payment group when a user receives an AR sales invoice payment.
Additional settings
Per payment method Create a separate payment group per payment method.

Balance forward configuration

When Accounts Receivable is configured to handle balance forward situations, the forwarded balance is included as a payment in the payment group.

For example, say that your company is configured for Balance forward. You create an invoice for a customer that totals R100 and receive a cheque payment for R150. Intacct creates a payment group for R100 for the AR sales invoice payment. The next month, you create a R20 AR sales invoice for that customer and apply a 20% discount memo for R4. The Intacct system will create a payment group for R12 after you create the AR sales invoice. When you drill into the payment group, you will see the -R4 discount and a R16 payment from the customer's previous balance listed.