On some business it is very common to be paid by initiating a direct debit for agreed parties.
It is often via SEPA direct debit but not always. For now user has to open “Lines to Pay” and use the tab “Receivable with Mandate”, then pay some selected lines. But it relies only on the fact that user as a SEPA mandate and customer may have different means which he would want the company to use.
Proposal
We add to party a list of direct debit reception which behaves like criteria (ordered with match). Each line define a preferred way (aka a journal) to make direct debit for a line to pay by the party. The default criteria is only the currency and the journal company.
A wizard/scheduled task loops over the receivable lines to pay and try to find a way to make a payment and make it.
Each payment process method adds to the direct debit reception the additional information needed (like the mandate for SEPA).
By using a match pattern, it will be possible to extend the criteria.
I’m wondering if there it make sense to add an option to group moves of direct debit before creating the payment. So for example, if a party has two lines with the same maturity date, only a single payment with the sum of the amount is created.
Currently it is possible to use this workflow with the Grup Lines wizard.
The odds are very low.
Also I’m not sure that you can merge in every cases such direct debit because customer is allowed to contest a debit.
Finally if some business generate multiple receivable lines, they should probably improve their invoicing workflow to group them under a single invoice.
We have this case when generating invoices from multiple source (i.e: from projects and from subscriptions). I’m not sure how we can group invoices in such case.