Yokoy Spend Management Connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you combine the strength of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Yokoy’s AI-powered spend management solution.

With Yokoy’s integration, data automatically flows back and forth with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, enabling you to automate the process, wherever spend is incurred.

MS Dynamics 365 Business Central is responsible for managing data flows to and from Yokoy. It uses the Yokoy API (OAuth2.0 authentication) to send master and transactional data such as POs and GRs to Yokoy and to retrieve invoice data for posting. Yokoy’s webhooks notify Business Central about changes in the document status, giving Business Central control over when data is retrieved and posted. For expenses, Yokoy is responsible for sending expense data to Business Central. Business Central retrieves receipts and attachments from the Yokoy API.

Each Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central company is associated with a Yokoy legal entity. If you have more than one company, you must set up a separate legal entity in Yokoy.

With the integration, you can send purchase orders and purchase receipts to Yokoy for processing with the invoices, matching PO and/or GR line items with invoice line items (two-way matching and three-way matching).

The integration supports item, fixed asset, and item charge line types. It does not support resource and allocation account line types.

Invoice documents are retrieved by Business Central as a base64 encoded PDFs and attached to the purchase order or purchase invoice. The document can be viewed in the Attachments tab for the purchase order or purchase invoice.

Yokoy communicates changes in Yokoy invoice states to Business Central using webhooks. Business Central is then responsible for retrieving the invoice data from Yokoy and posting as posted purchase invoice documents (if automatic posting is enabled).

You can choose to post invoices in Business Central on submission, either updating the purchase order with a payment block or creating a temporary purchase invoice with a payment block, or when invoices are fully approved and ready to export, booking the invoice data as posted purchase invoice and creating the corresponding vendor ledger entry.

In the case of expenses, Yokoy is responsible for posting expenses directly to the general journal.

With the invoice export, currency conversion is handled entirely by Business Central. This means that you use Business Central’s exchange rates to handle all conversion to the company currency and any adjustments as appropriate.

The approval flow for invoices and/or expenses is managed entirely by Yokoy using either a standard line manager or cost object workflow or by using a custom workflow.

The Yokoy for MS Dynamics 365 Business Central integration supports these versions:

The integration can be installed as an extension either as an extension package (for on premise deployment) or from the Microsoft AppSource.

Yokoy invoices are booked as purchase invoices (for non-PO invoices) and purchase orders (for PO invoices) for processing in Business Central as vendor payments.

Invoice documents are retrieved by Business Central as a base64 encoded PDF and attached to the purchase purchase/invoice. The document can be viewed in the Attachments tab for the purchase order/invoice.

The Yokoy integration can be configured to automatically post all purchase orders / purchase invoices as posted purchase invoices. Alternatively, finance users can post purchase orders or purchase invoices manually with the corresponding Business Central feature.

Business Central is responsible for all calculations of the net amount, gross amount, and tax amount, based on the quantity and unit price fields provided by Yokoy.

In addition, you can decide to post journal entries on:

Installing the Yokoy Connector in Business Central adds an additional field Yokoy Payment Status to the Purchase Order and the Purchase Invoice cards in Business Central. Only invoices with Yokoy Payment Status Approved are considered in the Suggested Vendor Payments report/available for application. If the Yokoy Payment Status is not approved (regardless of whether you post on approval or provisionally before approval), the invoice is blocked for payment & application.

If you set up the invoice workflow for provisional posting (i.e. data sent to Business before it is fully approved) in the Workflow Designer in Yokoy, the Yokoy Payment Status is Not approved until the invoice is approved and exported from Yokoy, at which point the status is changed to Approved. It is strongly advised that you do not change the Yokoy Payment Status manually from 'Not Approved' to 'Approved' as this disrupts the coherence with the provisional posting concept.

When the finance user exports the invoice (which may have been set up to be done automatically), Business Central fetches the invoice data from Yokoy, generates the vendor ledge entry, and books the invoice as a posted purchase invoice (for non-PO invoices) and a posted purchase invoice via the purchase order (for PO-invoices).

The Yokoy Payment Status is updated to Approved when the invoice exported.

Typical process in Yokoy

Note: the statuses given in parenthesis are the resulting state of the action.

When an invoice is created in Yokoy, vendor ledger entries are also created in Business Central, although posted purchase invoices are flagged with a payment block to prevent being taken by the Suggest Vendor Payments (339) report. When the invoice is approved in Yokoy and then exported (either manually or automatically), the Yokoy Payment Status is updated to Approved. Business Central removes the payment block flag and updates the vendor ledger entries.

If the invoice is rejected, you can set up Yokoy to automatically book a credit memo to offset the posted purchase invoice. You can choose whether you want Yokoy to automatically post credit memos or whether you want to handle rejected invoices manually.

Typical process in Yokoy

Note: the statuses given in parenthesis are the resulting state of the action.

If the invoice is rejected, then the posted purchase invoice with payment block is canceled in Business Central with a credit memo.

In this example, the invoice is provisionally posted after submit, but the workflow could equally be set up to post the invoice in Business Central after approval but before review.

When exporting invoices to Business Central, the Yokoy connector maps invoice dates as follows:

If no posting date is specified in Yokoy, the Yokoy connector takes the invoice issue date as the posting date.

Any due dates set in the Yokoy invoice are not reflected in Business Central since due dates are taken from the associated payment term.

Expenses are processed in Yokoy according to the company’s workflow (i.e. submit > approve > review).

Once processed, they are exported to Business Central by Yokoy either manually (as triggered by the Finance team) or automatically using an export job.

Expenses (single expenses, card transactions, and travel expenses) are posted to GL accounts. The integration can be configured to automatically post expenses to the corresponding ledgers or to create the corresponding entry in the General journal, so that the Finance team can post the entry manually.

Yokoy lets you post credit memos to Business Central (provided the option create credit notes has been enabled for the legal entity). Credit notes are handled as a credit memo in Business Central.

You can choose to import expense receipts (and attachments) into Business Central. If you import receipts, they are linked to the corresponding general journal entry. The receipt (and any attachments) is made available in the Incoming documents tab for each journal entry. In addition, when the journal entry is posted, receipts are made available from the Vendor journal entry.

The integration allows you to manage all master data in Microsoft 365 Business Central and synchronize it with Yokoy:

You can choose to synchronize all master data types or only specific data types (i.e. only vendors) as required. Master data synchronization is automated using jobs, however, you can also manually sync specific records directly from the card.

Users are synchronized directly from Business Central, creating Yokoy users in active or inactive status, as required. Yokoy users can be created from the Employee card. You can choose to import individual or multiple vendors/employees. Suppliers can be created from the Vendor card.

You can map financial dimensions (projects, departments, areas, etc.) as specific cost objects or tags in Yokoy, allowing you greater flexibility in your financial accounting setup.

Master data synchronization is automated using jobs, however, you can also manually sync specific records directly from the card.

For transactional data, you can configure how and when Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central sends purchase orders (POs) and purchase receipts (GRs) to Yokoy so it can be used to perform two-way and three-way matching with invoices, checking both header and line item data for any deviations.

Business Central displays information on which POs and GRs have been sent to Yokoy in the Purchase Order and Purchase Receipts cards, respectively.

Users can be created in Yokoy from the Business Central Employee cards as required.

Reporting structure (i.e. line managers) is not replicated from Business Central. You need to set up reporting in Yokoy if you plan to use line manager approval (or a custom workflow that uses line manager approval for approval escalation).

Line manager threshold, delegates and assistants (if appropriate), assigned cost object, and language preferences must be set up manually in the user profile.

The Yokoy integration sends this information from Business Central to Yokoy:

The Yokoy integration supports the synchronization of dimensions. You can choose to link dimensions with Yokoy cost centers (object) and Yokoy tag dimensions. Since Yokoy supports only one cost center per line item/journal entry, additional dimensions can be associated using tags.

Dimensions that you may want to sync in Yokoy:

For example, you can set up to sync the Business Central dimension values of Department as cost objects, and the Area dimension values Europe North, Europe North (EU), Europe North (Non EU) to the Yokoy tag dimension Country, creating tags Europe North, Europe North (EU), Europe North (Non EU).

All active dimensions are automatically imported as active cost objects. If the dimension or the dimension value is blocked in Business Central, they are still imported into Yokoy as cost object but with inactive status. Approval limits, cost object approvers, auto-approval limits, and cost object delegates must be set manually in Yokoy.

All active dimensions are imported as active tags. If the dimension or the dimension value is blocked in Business Central, they are still imported into Yokoy as tags but with inactive status. Approvers for expenses and invoices must be set up in Yokoy.

For every GL account, you can synchronize them as an invoice and/or expense category in Yokoy, as required.

The integration creates the basic definition of the category in Yokoy (name, description, account), but you can edit the categories once synchronized in Yokoy to display a symbol in Yokoy.

Vendors are mapped to Yokoy’s suppliers. Changes in the Vendor card are automatically synced with Yokoy. However, you can manually push changes from Business Central.

Business Central provides basic details for the Yokoy supplier:

Default supplier settings must be set up manually. Payment terms for the legal entity are not synchronized from Business Central.

Business Central purchase orders are used in two-way and three-way matching in Yokoy.

With the connector, the Purchase Order card contains additional fields to track whether the PO has been created in Yokoy, the corresponding Yokoy purchase order ID, and the Yokoy Payment status.

The Yokoy Payment status tracks the approval status of the associated invoice. This field is used to determine whether a payment block should be applied to the Posted Purchase Invoice entry to prevent payment in the event you have set up Vendor Ledger posting on submission instead of posting on export.

The integration supports these lines in the purchase order:

PO header data

PO line item data

Posted purchase receipts are processed as goods receipts in Yokoy.

Goods receipts are always associated to a purchase order and are used to perform three-way matching.

In general, item (charge) and fixed asset line item types are considered Non-GR line items in Yokoy. However, you can associate them to a posted purchase receipt, if required.

GR header data

GR line item data