D365FO project invoices are usually emailed to clients. In the case of Time and Material (T&M) projects, we register the expenses on a project, so that we can cross-charge them to our client. A common requirement is to email the receipts of project invoice expenses together with the project invoice from D365FO.

We got the idea for this article in a video article "Do you know… how to print invoices with document attachments", where the author demonstrated how this task can be executed through the ER framework. At the end of that article, author points out a few limitations of a pure ER-based solution. It gave us the idea to present how one can overcome these limitations by combining ER with Docentric.

In this article, we demonstrate how to email a D365FO project invoice report together with project expenses that are recorded on the project. Such outgoing email will have the ER-based project invoice as the first and main attachment and several additional attachments with various expense receipts. We will explain how to perform a simple configuration to specify the attachments. We will also show how to digitally sign the project invoice.

Project Invoice with Expense Transactions

We will use one ongoing T&M project for this example. Let’s say that during the previous month we registered some transactions on this project. We have an Expense-type journal, where the expenses (for example hotel, taxi, meals, …) of employees are registered. When we add each attachment, we decide if we want to send it with the invoice and set the attachment’s properties accordingly. The most obvious way is to use the External/Internal restriction, but Docentric introduced some additional fields on the attachment form, such as Category, which help in fine-tuning which data should be sent.

Below left we see one Expense journal with 4 journal lines, each having its attachments, and on the right side there is an example of one attachment with a hotel invoice. The attachment has the Chargeable expenses category.

Once we post the Expense journal with these transactions, we are ready to prepare a Project invoice proposal. An example of Project invoice proposal with these four Expense transactions is shown in the figure below.

The attachments from the journal lines were copied to the attachments of the proposal lines in the process of creating the proposal. Next, in the process of posting the proposal, attachments were copied to the attachments on invoice transactions lines. The image below shows the posted Project invoice:

Docentric CBD Replica for Project Invoice

Because we want to execute the report through the Docentric framework, we need to register the Project invoice report in Docentric report setup. At the bottom of the PSAProjInvoice.Report configuration, we register the templates that can be used for this report. In this example we use the ER-based template. Below we can see Docentric report setup on the left side and a preview of the Project invoice CBD Replica on the right side (CBD = Configurable business documents).

Electronic Signing of a PDF Document

We have mentioned previously that we also want to electronically sign the outgoing Project invoice, so let’s configure it. We will specify which signature and appearance (visualization) we want to apply, if any. In Docentric report setup for the PSAProjInvoice report, on the Document generation > PDF Security form, we add one entry for the company from which we will print Project invoice (USSI in our example). We select the certificate and optionally the signature appearance to be applied when PDF document for Project invoice is generated.

Learn how to configure the electronic signatures >>

Print Management Setup

We need to configure the additional attachments to be added to the outgoing email. We do it in the Docentric Email print destination.

We need to configure the rule based on which we plan to fetch the Document management attachments. We will point to the attachments on the invoice Journal lines. From all the attachments found on journal lines, we want to take only those having the Chargeable expenses category:

Read more about the additional report attachments >>

Below is the email message generated based on this setup. It has four attachments: the first one is the Project invoice report and others are the expenses.

As you can see, everything can be done by simple configuration steps: use the Docentric ER-based replica template for the Project invoice report, specify the electronic signature and signature appearance to be applied and finally setup the rule for adding the expenses as additional email attachments.

Watch the whole process in this video: