I just learned about the Howto category and propose adding a “direct debit howto” there. Here is a draft, with still some open issues:
Questions:
It looks like only a valid mandate is required and party.payment_direct_debit ignored. Is this correct?
What is party.payment_direct_debit used for then?
I want customers pay via direct debit. I understood, that I need to
Setup
Requried modules:
accounting_payment
SEPA only: accounting_payment_sepa
Add a Bank Account to your Company
(Company→Companies→[NAME]→Banking→Add→…)
SEPA only: Set the SEPA Identifier for your Company
(Company→Companies→[NAME]→Identifiers→Add→SEPA Creditor Identifier)
Once per Customer
Add a Bank Account to the party
(Party→Parties→[NAME]→Banking→Add→…)
Enable direct debit for the party
(Party→Parties→[NAME]→Accounting→ Check “Direct Debit”)
SEPA only: Add SEPA direct debit mandate
(Banking→SEPA Mandates→Add→…)
“Identification”: ???
remaining entries as required
Invoicing
Whether an invoice is paid by direct debit is not decided when creating the invoice, but depends on whether “direct debit” is set for the party and whether there is a valid mandate for the party.
Anyhow you might want to add a Payment Term “Direct Debit” (Remainder to be paid in 0 days) to explicitly state this.
Direct Debit Payment
Go to Finance→Payments→Lines to Pay→Receivalbe with Mandate
Select the payments you want to direct debit
Run the “Pay Lines” Wizard from the Actions button.
Note: The wizard is only available if there is at least one payment line selected.
Select date of payment, select accounting info
New payments are generated and avilalbe in Finance→Payments→Payments
There still seems something missing I managed to create an empty XML message (0 bytes).
Go to Finance→Payments→Payments
Optional (depending on your workflow and separation of duties) Approve payments
Process payments
This will create a payment group to be fed to the SEPA message
Go to Finance→Payments→SEPA Messages
Select New
Type: OUT
Origin “Payment Group”, select the respective Payment Group
Export the direct debit file for online-banking software how to do this
If you use any screenshot please use the latest version demo server to create them.
As @udono replied direct debit check is used to indicate that the supplier is doing direct debit to the company. For doing direct debit to a customer you should have a signed mandate from the company indicating the bank account.
I do not think this section is required. You should only focus on documenting the SEPA generation.
This is mandatory on Tryton. If there is no separation of roles the same user can approve and process.
Once you are on the list of SEPA messages you will see a button to download the file.
If the file you generated is empty the field may be hidden.
There are still some step(s) missing before. When following my description, I’m not ending up with a SEPA document.
Though it might not be necessary for you, being an expert, it is required for understanding the process - as this is what many people might think.
While I understand you want to have high quality content: The requirements are quite demanding, and fulfilling them is very time-consuming. This is quite a huge hurdle to take. I’m actually rethinking whether I should spend more time on this How-to if it’s on danger to be put on the huge pile of never-finished documentation just because it’s not meeting 150% quality requirements.
Then just mention that in the list of lines to pay you have all the pending moves from the invoices.
I prefer to have two small how-tos than a bigger one
Welcome to Tryton: we value the quality. As we have a good software the documentation should be in conconrdance.
Sorry for putting the presure. As you started documenting using menu I just wanted to explain the format we are using to fully match the requirements.
I may understand you are still learning the process so once we have a valid starting post others may complete your work. (I will do)
This is the main reason to use the forum for writing howto: The content is interactive and if there is something that can be improved others can do.
JFR, I just updated a how-to that I writen some time ago thanks to this sugestion:
No. IIRC it separates the payables from the direct debits. For the payables you need to take action to pay them, for the direct debits your supplier takes action. It is used to help the user avoiding double payments. (See the account_payment module and grep for direct_debit.)
