Using the Payment Journal

Before continuing, make sure you’ve completed the following steps:

• Install the Atlar app in Business Central
• Import Bank Details (optional)

Payments

In line with Atlar’s integration philosophy for Business Central, changes to the standard Payment Journal are minimal.

Payments in Business Central work largely as described in the official Dynamics 365 Business Central documentation.
In summary, the payment process consists of the following steps:

1. Create a Purchase Invoice.
2. Open a Payment Journal and export the journal (or selected lines).
3. Approve payments in the Atlar dashboard.
4. Post the Payment Journal (or selected lines) when they reach the EXECUTED status.

Following this process creates payments in Atlar that follow your Atlar Approval Chains and are executed through the connected bank for the selected account.

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Heads up:

Payment exports and status updates between Business Central and Atlar happen asynchronously.
It may take a short time before a newly exported or updated payment shows its final status.

1. Create a purchase invoice

To follow along with this example, create a manual purchase invoice.

2. Open a payment journal and export payment lines

To pay the invoices you just created, navigate to Cash Management → Payment Journals. You’ll see a list of journals by account.

Select the journal for the source account you want to initiate payments from.
Within the journal, you can use Suggest Vendor Payments to have Business Central automatically generate payment lines based on your open invoices.

Review the suggested lines and confirm all details. When ready, go to the Bank tab and select Export. This sends the payment lines to Atlar, where you can review them in the Atlar Dashboard.

If any exported line encounters an issue, the error will appear in Atlar and will also be synced back asynchronously to the corresponding payment line in Business Central. You can correct the issue and export again.

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Tip:

You can export specific payment lines instead of the entire journal — handy when only part of a batch is ready for approval or payment.

3. Approve payments in Atlar

This step happens in the Atlar dashboard and is not specific to Business Central.
See Approvals for details on configuring and managing approval chains.

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Note:

If your organization uses multi-step approvals, make sure all approvers are correctly assigned in Atlar.
Payments won’t be executed until all approval steps are complete.

4. Post payment lines

Atlar reports the status of each exported payment line as CREATED, APPROVED, SENT, FAILED, or EXECUTED.
If a payment fails, the status FAILED is reported back to Business Central.

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Warning:

Only post payment lines with EXECUTED status.
Posting before execution can cause reconciliation mismatches in Business Central.

Payment lines with the EXECUTED status indicate that the transaction has been completed.
These lines should be Posted so they can be matched later in Business Central’s native Bank Account Reconciliation module.

Auto-posting executed payments (optional)

You can let Atlar post executed payments for you. The setting is off by default and applies per bank account: open the Bank Account Card and enable Auto-Post Executed Payments in the Atlar section.

When this is on, a payment line is posted automatically once:

• the payment has the EXECUTED status, and
• Atlar has matched it to a bank transaction on that account.

Before posting, Atlar sets the Posting Date to the execution date. For foreign-currency payments, it also sets Amount (LCY) to the amount the bank actually debited. The posted entry then matches the bank transaction, ready for Bank Account Reconciliation.

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Warning: some payments may not be posted automatically

Sometimes Atlar can't match an executed payment to a bank transaction, for example when the bank reports different details or combines several payments into one. That line stays unposted with the EXECUTED status, even though the money has left the account. The same happens if Business Central rejects the post, for example because the posting date is in a closed period.

Check your payment journals regularly for unposted EXECUTED lines. For each one, find the matching transaction on your bank statement and decide for yourself whether to post it:

1. Adjust the Posting Date to the bank transaction date.
2. For foreign-currency payments, adjust Amount (LCY) to the amount actually debited.
3. Post the line.