How Aptify Integrates with Accounts Payable Systems to Track Product Costs

In Aptify, each Products record includes several cost related tabs that lets an organization track the various expenses incurred with getting a product to market. This includes a Cost Planning tab that can be used for planning the overall forecast of a given cost, a Cost Details tab that stores the details of each cost and a Cost Summary tab that displays useful summary statistics for a given product's expenses. These tabs are found under the Products record's Accounting tab. The figure below is an example of the Cost Summary tab that displays summary information about the expenses for a product by cost type.

 
For product cost tracking, Aptify also provides the ability to transfer the cost data from Aptify to an Accounts Payable (AP) system. Then, after the accounting department processes the product cost information within the AP system and prints the checks, a user can import the applicable check numbers back into Aptify.

The following provides an overview of how Aptify integrates with a third-party AP system to track product costs:

1. A member of the accounting department creates the appropriate Cost Types records for a particular product within Aptify. See Creating Product Cost Types for more details.
2. An organization forecasts the cost of a particular event or other product by creating Cost Planning records. See Creating Cost Planning Records for Products for more details.
3. Once the overall forecast for an event/product has been determined, an organization creates Product Cost Details records for the details of an event, publication or any other product as necessary. See Creating Product Cost Details for more details.
4. A member of the accounting department (or another authorized user) approves the Product Cost Details records, triggering the creation of the appropriate Scheduled Transactions record for the accrued expense. See Creating Product Cost Details for more details.
5. A member of the accounting department opens a particular product or creates a view of the product cost details service and runs the AP Export wizard to generate the file(s) that can be exported into the third-party AP system.
   • The AP Export wizard can also be run for each Product from a Products record's Accounting > Cost Details tab.
   • For export to Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP), Aptify generates two files: a Vendor file and a Transaction file. The Vendor file contains information about the recipient(s). The Transaction file contains the cost details.
   • For each export operation, Aptify creates an AP Export Runs record for tracking purposes.
   • See Running the AP Export Wizard for more information on the export wizard.
     
     
6. A member of the accounting department imports the export files into the AP system and generates printed checks to process the expense. When the check is cut within the AP system, the appropriate payable general ledger (GL) account is debited and the cash account is credited.
7. A member of the accounting department generates a file from the AP system to import the check details into Aptify.
8. A member of the accounting department imports the check details into Aptify using the AP Import wizard. The wizard creates an AP Import Runs record and updates the AP Integration tab on the applicable Product Cost Details records as needed.
   • See Running the AP Export Wizard for information on the import wizard.