Dynamics 365 For Operations Tip: Vendor Prepayments and Revenue Recognition for Fixed Price Projects

Large amounts of prepayments to vendors is often a common business requirement but how do you make sure things don't get lost in the shuffle?

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    Hello, Good to be back here on the blog !!! Jumping straight into the topic here today about a new addition of a feature for vendor prepayments in relation with fixed price project revenue recognition !!

    Issuing large amounts of prepayments to vendors is often a common business requirement for large scale, long-term fixed price projects, which involves a lot of sub-contracted work. Vendors often request prepayments for the subcontracting services they are contracted to deliver for these projects. These prepayments can sometimes be just a flat amount based on mutual decisions, or it can sometimes be a percentage of the total cost of the subcontracting service. There can be several months of gap between when the prepayments are issued and when the vendors actually deliver the services.

    For such projects, customers usually recognize revenue on a percentage completion basis and need the ability to include these vendor prepayments in the project percentage completion calculation of the project for revenue recognition/revenue estimates calculations.

    In this post, we will evaluate one of the new features of Dynamics 365 For Operations (Referred as D365 – Operations from here on), which allows us to consider these vendor prepayments automatically when running the monthly revenue recognition/estimates for fixed price projects for calculating the % completion of the project.

    For this demonstration, I have setup a fixed price project and the associated contract already. This project is setup to recognize revenue on a % completion basis.

    Contract Setup

    Project Setup

    The Project Manager has created and submitted the purchase requisition for approval so that the services can be procured from Rebar Supply Co. Ltd. See screenshot below.

    PR Submitted

    The purchase requisition gets approved by the designated manager and the Purchase order is automatically created. See screenshot below.

    PR Approved

    The Project procurement team/Project manager then sets up the prepayment details on the project purchase order that was automatically created upon approval of the requisition.

    PrepaySetupOnPO

    Finance and Accounting team now processes the prepayment invoice to initiate the prepayment to the vendor.

    Prepay Invoice

    Prepayment

    Now that the finance team has processed the vendor prepayment for the subcontracting work, let us now go ahead and see what happens when they run the monthly revenue recognition process for this project.

    Notice that system was able to consider the vendor prepayment cost for the project and was able to determine the percentage completion based on the total project budget/forecast defined. See screenshot below

    PComp

    When this revenue recognition entry is posted, the revenue amount (based on Percentage complete and the total contract value) will be posted to general ledger. We all know how it works from here ?

    That’s it for today !!

    Sandeep

    Sandeep ChaudhurySandeep Chaudhury is a Dynamics 365 enthusiast with over 10 years of experience in functional consulting, Solutions architecture and systems integration, with expertise in the areas of Professional services automation(Project Management and accounting), Financials Management, Services Management, Sales and Marketing, Human resource management, Travel and Expenses Management and Procurement & Sourcing modules of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP. He has experience working with the Dynamics 365, AX 7, AX 2012 R3, AX 2012 R2, Dynamics 365 for Operations and more.