Expected payment date and notes inspired by Xero

Where do I start with all the work that the Microsoft Business Central team needs to do in improving the invoice to cash process.

• Cashflow payment terms are cumbersome (why not average days late instead?) and therefore cashflow forecasts are misleading.

• There is no inbuilt ability to capture the expected firm date a customer has agreed to pay aside from trying to use the next to useless comments sheets.

Although floatapp is the leader in cashflow forecasting and ezycollect is a leader in automating collections, most customers are happy with the standard functions of xero.

Xero Invoices Awaiting Payment View

Obviously, the team at Business Central give us a few less UX components in the toolshed to try and implement this functionality. We aren't going to be expanding a read only list page and editing an inline / in-context dialog anytime soon.

That said, Business Central gives us the ability for an amateur small business tech savvy customer to roll their own, which is something that Xero is not geared to. So 2hrs later, I've deployed my solution into production. Along the way I needed to learn how to:

• Update field values in a posted document table

• Bring together sales invoice and ledger entries

• Work with custom dialogs

• Hack the customer lookup trigger

I'm proud of the result... but it begs the question. If I can do this, what are the product teams doing? It mirrors Xero's functionality exactly, sans integration with any cashflow forecasting which I'll talk about later.

Key features include:

• Ability to easily see if an expected payment date has been added, or just a note has been added to a specific invoice.

• Always assume that new note is entered but show the old note and last datetime it was added in context.

• Use of emoji to visually indicate if an expected payment date can be added (you can't do it if the invoice is closed).

• Added capability to see that same field and perform exact same functionality from the customer ledger entry (if it is an invoice).

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know how to:

• Produce a solution to shrink the multiline field that shows past comments to the number of actual lines since it is read only

• Get rid of the _ text that gets displayed when a field has no text and where drilldown has been set to true, which I need to trigger customer behavior.

It isn't more beautiful than what Xero does, but it is just as functional and with a little more work I can imagine adapting it to:

• Be able to select multiple invoices at once and apply a consistent date and comment (which requires some thinking about UX but is technically possible).

Long term I'd like to combine with a predicted days delayed field and figure out how to override the cashflow worksheet generation to calculated expected cashflow receipt on either the due date, the average predicted days delay for a customer or if it exists the expected payment date set by user in this system. Let me know if that's possible.