Fixing a Partner's Payment Method

Some suppliers report the wrong payment method on their invoices. The most common case in Hungary: a purchase you paid by card is reported to NAV as cash. AI Finance Team believes the invoice, closes it as settled, and the real card debit on your bank statement is then left with nothing to match against, for as long as you keep buying from that supplier.

Fixed payment method lets you tell the system the truth about one partner, once. From then on, whenever their invoices state a payment method, the one you set is used instead.

That last condition matters: the rule only replaces a method the document actually states. NAV leaves the payment method out of roughly a third of invoices, and those arrive with no method at all rather than with yours. They are harmless, because an invoice with no method is never closed as cash, but if you set a rule and nothing seems to change, this is usually why. If the PDF of such an invoice is uploaded later, the method printed on the PDF is taken over, and your rule applies to it like to any other stated method.

Why This Matters

The payment method on an invoice is not just a label. AI Finance Team reads cash as already settled: the invoice is closed, and closed invoices are deliberately kept out of matching, because there is no bank payment to find.

That is correct for a genuine cash purchase. When the method is wrong, three things go wrong together:

• the invoice is marked Cash and disappears from the matching queue,
• the matching bank transaction stays unmatched forever, and
• the partner's balance never clears, because as far as the ledger is concerned the invoice was paid in cash and the card debit is a separate, unexplained payment.

Setting the real method fixes all three at once. There is no separate "send it to matching" switch: an invoice whose method is not cash simply stays open and goes through matching like any other.

When To Use It

Use it when the mislabel is consistent for that partner: every invoice from them says cash, and every payment to them is on the bank statement. That is usually a quirk of the supplier's till or invoicing software rather than a mistake anyone made.

Do not use it for a one-off. If a partner you normally pay by transfer paid cash once, or the reverse, correct that single invoice instead: see Fixing invoices you already have.

It works in the other direction too. If a partner's invoices say transfer but you always pay them from the till, set the method to Cash and their invoices are closed on arrival instead of waiting for a bank payment that will never come. The auto-close is not switched off by this feature, only re-pointed.

Setting The Method

The setting is on the partner's Rules tab, the last of the rules there.

1. Go to Master data → Partners and open the partner.
2. Open the Rules tab.
3. Under Fixed payment method, choose the method you actually use with this partner: Bank transfer, Bank card, Cash, Voucher or Other.
4. Click Save.

1. The Rules tab, where this lives.
2. The dropdown, with the app's own forward-only note under it.
3. The chip that appears on the header once a rule is set.

Save stays disabled until you change something, and a Reset link appears beside it while there are unsaved changes. Afterwards the partner's header carries a Payment: chip with the method, which is the only place the rule is visible at a glance: the partner list has no column and no filter for it.

Setting it needs the "Edit master data" permission, and the partner pages are accountant-side, so a client user cannot reach them at all. The dropdown is shown even to a firm-side member who lacks the permission, and the save then fails with an error message rather than being disabled, which is confusing but not a fault.

Leaving it on None means no rule: the invoice's own payment method is used, exactly as before.

Three things that quietly switch it off

• The partner must be verified, and the invoice's counterparty must be linked to it. An invoice whose counterparty was never linked never picks the rule up.
• Archiving the partner makes the rule inert. The value is kept and comes back if you restore the partner.
• Merging loses it. A merge carries the tax number, country, address, aliases and name patterns to the surviving partner, but not the fixed payment method, and then archives the one that held it. Set it again on the survivor.

It also has no direction filter: it applies to your sales invoices to that partner exactly as it does to purchase invoices.

It Only Affects Invoices That Arrive Later

Saving a fixed payment method changes nothing that is already in the system. It applies to invoices that arrive after the moment you save. There is no "run on existing records" button here, unlike the fixed-category rules, and saving starts no reprocessing of any kind.

"Arrive" means when the invoice reached AI Finance Team, not the date on it. A NAV sync run after you set the rule that pulls in six months of back invoices creates those records today, so all of them take the rule.

The reason for looking forward only is that a payment method is a statement about something that already happened. Rewriting it across months of history would silently change invoices your accountant has already reviewed, and possibly already sent to the office.

One caveat worth knowing if you change the rule twice. Changing the value restarts the clock, and invoices that arrived between the two saves are then outside it. They keep what they were given for as long as nothing re-reads them, but they are not protected: if such an invoice is processed again, it falls back to what its document said. If you change a rule on a partner with a lot of history, check that partner's invoices afterwards.

Clearing it back to None stops the rule for future invoices and leaves everything existing untouched.

Fixing invoices you already have

For the invoices that are already stuck as Cash, correct them one at a time:

1. Open the invoice.
2. On the Matching & payment tab, the payment method sits right beside the payment status. Open it and choose the method you actually used, for example Card.

Choosing a method other than cash re-opens an invoice that was closed as cash automatically, and puts it back into matching. Two cases are left alone on purpose: an invoice whose status a person set, and one that already has a matched payment. For those, or if you only want to re-open the invoice without touching its method, use the small arrow menu at the end of the same row and choose Mark as open.

Re-opening an invoice puts it back into matching. If the bank transaction is already in the system the two usually meet within a minute or so, either as a finished match or as a suggestion for you to confirm, depending on how confident the match is.

A method you choose on the invoice shows set by hand beside it, and it is final for that invoice: neither the partner's fixed payment method nor a later refresh from NAV changes it. Every change appears on the invoice's History tab.

Choosing the method and re-opening both need the "Edit invoices" permission, which is a different one from setting the rule.

If a partner has more than a handful of stuck invoices, set the fixed payment method first, which stops the list growing, and then work through the existing ones.

What You Will See Afterwards

On an invoice where the rule applied, the Matching & payment tab shows the method you set, with a note beside it saying it came from the partner's fixed payment method. The note is there so the method does not look like a bug: on a NAV invoice you may well see Card there while the document itself says cash. If someone later chooses a different method on that invoice by hand, the note changes to set by hand and that choice wins over the rule.

The invoice's own labels are shorter than the ones on the partner dropdown, so the rule you set as Bank card reads as Card on the invoice. Same thing.

Nothing is hidden. The Document tab still renders the supplier's original NAV report exactly as it was filed, payment method included, behind the NAV data toggle, so you can always compare what was reported against what you decided.

The method you set never prints in the export itself: the RLB and Hessyn files both write the payment mode as a fixed value. What it does change is whether the invoice is in the Hessyn export at all, because that file leaves out everything closed as cash. So setting a partner to a non-cash method is what keeps their invoices in it.

There is one place the method does travel: Business Central. Where that connection is set up and its payment methods have been mapped, the push sends the method with the invoice. The invoice's Matching & payment tab shows what will be sent, and shows nothing when no mapping applies, which is a normal outcome rather than an error.

Your Own Decisions Always Win

If you have set an invoice's payment status or its payment method by hand, that decision is permanent. Nothing in the automatic pipeline will change it back, not the partner rule and not a later refresh of the invoice from NAV.

This also fixes an older annoyance. Before this feature, re-opening a NAV cash invoice could be silently undone the next time that invoice was refreshed from NAV, and it would quietly close itself again. Your override now sticks.

Related

• Managing Partners - the rest of the partner detail page, including the other rules that sit beside this one.
• Invoice Matching - what happens once an invoice is open and looking for its payment.
• NAV Online Számla - where invoice data comes from for Hungarian workspaces, and what NAV does and does not report.