In an attempt to better control cashflow, our Accounts Payable staff is inquiring on the ability to group supplier payments (employee payments, utilities, government, etc.). They would like to 'select payments' for these groups into a payment batch. I had looked into utilizing Supplier Groups (which would be a fairly laborous task considering we already utilize them to separate out national/international suppliers), but Supplier Group is not a valid selection criteria for Select Invoices for Payment. We were not in favor of utilizing custom transaction types or payment methods to differentiate between 'groups'. We also do not have source code.

Has anyone come across this same issue? I thought perhaps that one options would be to create a field on the Supplier Master where Accounts Payable could enter a code representing their defined groups and then having a session which would utilize the same selection criteria as Select Invoices for Payment (which would also include selection criteria for this group code). The custom session would then utilize AFS to run the 'standard' Select Invoices for Payment multiple times (once for each supplier associated with the particular group). Each AFS run would place the documents into the same payment batch which then could be processed normally.

This sounds like a lot of work just so some bean-counters can play with cash :D (no offense intended... I was a bean-counter once upon a time).

Just curious to see if anyone had any different ideas or if there was a way we could use Baan 'standard' to accomplish the same goal. I thank you for any information you can provide.

You explained it all well and you pretty much looked at all possibilities. I would assume BPs are not in a specific range either. Can see the problem in using different transactions type too.
However i dealt with a similar scenario, where we had to pay our reps together as a different batch. What i did is created a dummy Payment Method(No bank data or anything set up on it), which they will link to those reps and use it to select the invoices into a batch. After this is done a small update program will replace the dummy payment method with the real one (in 5c is its an update to tfcmg101). This update program ishooked to the select invoices for payment session as a button and they just click it after the select and it does the update. This does the trick for us. If you have more than one payment method, then you will have to use a mapping table.

Thank you for the idea. I'll be talking to the users soon.