Finance & Accounting

RE: Is Myopia Stifling Your Invoice Process Automation Strategy?

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:10:16 GMT

We just converted to Ariba ICS and now are sending the non-PO invoices through P2P. There are several unresolved issues after the implementation, almost all of them internal to our operation but the limitations in Ariba impact our ability to address them and meet our goal of everything going through P2P.

Define invoice: Originally the focus was on Goods and Services but we have discovered that any transaction that requires a payment is processed through the invoice transaction. If you limit yourself to G&S you are leaving a lot of transactions. Identifying the G&S from everything else in an automated way is difficult.
Rent, Utilities and Taxes: billing and workflow for these categories do not follow normal G&S procedures
Check Requisitions: Jack of all trades that also does not follow normal G&S procedures
Vendor Management. What is the most efficient way to deal with one time and low volume vendors
Non-Expense Accounting: Anything not a G&S invoice may use non-expense accounting (Revenue, Balance, etc.)

RE: The Economy is Recovering – So How Is Your Business?

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:45:45 GMT

The ideal way to succeed in business is to maintain organized transactions.Likewise. a key aspect in business management is to know your business

finances.Keep track with your cash flows, receivables and the average sales everyday. If you don't have the money to hire an accountant to control your business finances, there are many software programs available now that can use to track your businesses expenses. Having proper procedures in place for financial management will pay off in the long run.An entrepreneur might need installment loans for a short term course that will tackle the importance of business management.

RE: Benchmark & Measure Your P2P and Invoice Automation Program

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:24:37 GMT

The average company processes fewer than 10K invoices per full time equivalent AP staff annually. How many invoices does your company process per FTE? Are you still using paper? Is there a correlation between these two?

RE: Incent your suppliers to submit eInvoices through Ariba Payment Management

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:05:15 GMT

I am a supplier. I have completed a job, but I do not know where to go to find the offer to submit an invoice for the completed job. Can you help me?

RE: From Keystrokes to Nanoseconds; AP Automation is much more then Eliminating Paper Invoices

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:15:42 GMT

I am always reminded in my client relationships that while many of these changes are incremental, the overarching message is one of competitiveness. I heard an analogy the other day about why NFL scouts put so much stock in speed. Although one person may be 1/10th a second faster than a competitor, that 1/10th of a second is the difference in making a shoulder tackle versus a finger tackle. The finger tackle never works.

In business, one competitor may have an embedded cost of doing business that's 2% lower than a competitor because of process improvement throughout their business. It's huge! With business changing as rapidly as it does, being behind a competitor by 2% for any period of time may spell the difference between success and failure. Automation is not a "du jour" solution. It's here to stay because of the business wide ripple effects highlighted in the Aberdeen study and the instituional commitment to competitiveness.

RE: AP Professionals: Jump Start Your Way to AP Automation in 2011

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:48:18 GMT

We have just started our ICS journey and I can echo many of the benefits to the Non-PO invoice automation. We expect to gain greater transaction visibility and transparency from receipt to payment as well as being able to leverage the workflow automation that P2P 10s2 introduced. There is not nearly as much benefit to PO automation through ICS compared to the real improvements through PO flip by the vendor.

We are finding the challenges in the project are on dealing with the exceptions to standard process. Manual processes are much more forgiving to deviations to standards and are more flexible. It is also going to present a Change Management challenge. End users are going to have the same responsibilities but perform them in entirely different ways.

RE: AP Professionals: Jump Start Your Way to AP Automation in 2011

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:55:50 GMT

This topic is coming up more and more in my client discussions. While ICS can be utilized for both PO and non PO invoicing, I tend to see more interest in non PO invoices, which typically account for over half of all invoices, sometimes up to 65-70%. Client systems I typically see regarding manual processing require large amount of FTEs, mistakes, slow downs in processing, work flow, etc. A major internal investment. ICS can help this tremendously, but it's hard work to get there. The pay off is big and besides lowering costs of processing, visability is improved, processes are streamlined and it also opens up some opportunities for capturing added payment discounts. Implementing ICS is a major business change and requires good process management, but I think the end product is well worth it.

RE: The 2010 COUNTRY GUIDE: paperless eInvoicing in Sweden

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:34:58 GMT

Is the "03_Invoice_FieldLevelANRules_v1.41_AN48.xls" file available somewhere?

RE: Conference Call on Procurement & Finance this Thursday

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:31:37 GMT

The replay of the call is posted here (top center embedded audio player).

Thanks to all of those who joined! Great call on a topic that has HUGE potential in many organizations.

RE: Working Capital: Are you working it, or is it working you?

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:15:14 GMT

I think benchmarking is a very useful exercise, but one need to be cautious not to oversimplify the results. Working capital is to a great extend function of supply chain structure- ANY component can be changed by inserting an intermediary (if I want to increase DPO or DIO I can insert a buying agent who will hold inventory and wait long time in exchange for a fat margin. Similarly, distributor would be very happy to pre-pay in exchange for large early payment discount and would hold inventory if priced very aggressively). These measures may be either value creating (if the company’s access to capital is limited or prohibitively expensive) or value destroying (so the company kills its profitability for “dead” cash on the balance sheet). In designing working capital strategy the company clearly needs to look beyond the numbers and understand what roles does it play in their overall strategy

Below are few links to articles I published on the subject (in GT News and Private Equity News):

http://www.tenzor.co.uk/working-capital/working-capital-seeing-a-broader-picture-by-igor-zax/

http://www.tenzor.co.uk/mergers-acquisitions/igor-zax-published-an-article-mind-the-chain-lessons-for-firms-in-distressed-markets-in-private-equity-news/

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:12:18 GMT

We are trying to allow the user name instead of the email as well. I understand the limitations on many vendors AR systems. Some are simply archaic.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:56:37 GMT

Up Coming Non-PO Invoice Webinar for those interested in this topic.

e-Invoicing Strategies for PO and Non-PO Invoices

Date: August 19, 2010 - 7:00pm GMT / 2:00pm EDT / 11:00am PDT

Registration: https://aribameetings.webex.com/aribameetings/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=574239954

Registrations to date: 15

Matching a purchase order to an invoice is a proven method for improving compliance; however, for many organizations, some portion of corporate spend may not involve POs. In these cases, consolidating PO and non-PO invoices for electronic processing can dramatically reduce errors, exceptions and processing costs.

In this free webinar, James Tucker, global director of product marketing, Ariba Collaborative Finance Management Solutions, will discuss how you can transform your accounts payable operations by consolidating the electronic processing of PO and non-PO invoices.

Attend this webinar and learn how you can:
- Compress the processing of valid PO and non-PO invoices from weeks or months to a few days
- Drive first-time match rates of PO invoices close to 100%
- Implement business rules and electronic workflow that eliminate virtually all non-PO invoice exceptions
- Expand the capture of early payment discounts for all invoices

Attendees will also receive the latest research report on invoice processing from PayStream Advisors.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:17:47 GMT

Another aspect of Non-PO Invoicing I'm curious about is % of spend on Non-PO, if these are centralized or decentralized in your processing (that is do you let AP handle them first or have them go to the business unit), and finally, what your typical approach is with payment timing and net terms with Non-PO. Some customers have longer payment terms to ensure approval time. Some centralize and other decentralize. Finally, is the Non-PO caused because of budget based spend, the nature of the commodity such as telecom, freight, rent, untilities that are more billing oriented, or based on not raising PO's when you would prefer to do so.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:13:31 GMT

That makes sense. I think a deeper dive into the consolidator's technology would be useful also. I can see the problem they are solving. If you could email me the names of the consolidators you use for each type of billing function I could reach out to them to discuss their technology and challenges. I'm at jfox@ariba.com. You can share in exchange if you are comfortable or just email the names of the consolidators to me. I'm curious about Freight, Telecom, Utilities and specialty services such as maintenance, window washing/lawncare/facilities, etc where you use a consolidator.

We have a number of customers who use consolidators that end up sending the consolidated invoice into the Ariba Network for processing and I'm interested in speaking with a few of them.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:02:34 GMT

We recognize that this issue is going to be an ongoing challenge. The best case would be for the vendor to provide some ID that could be automated to match the Ariba Unique user ID, but that is not always going to be possible or in Germany's case, desirable.

Another aspect we haven't discussed is the shift of the workload and responsibility for data from the customer to the vendor. As you mention, we are expecting the vendor to retain more and more data about the transaction than ever before. We are constantly running into vendors that installed the CRM app once (maybe for Y2K) and haven't upgraded since. (any Buyer 7.1 users out there? ).

Ultimately, the more we try to automate the P2P cycle and reduce manual intervention, the more we have to have synchronicity between the supplier and customer data.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:45:40 GMT

The utility consolidator gets all the bills, analyzes, scans and captures the important usage and cost data from them. In turn, they generate a multiline cXML invoice file twice a week that we FTP from their site and load on the Ariba app server. It gets processed with the other invoices pulled from the ASN every night. In this case, the utility provider is paying the individual bills, the large consolidated bill is routed to a single approver and we fund an account that night for the ills approved.

It is similar for the legal billing. The legal dept. contracted with a legal matter software provider that has a network of law firms. Those firms bill us through the network for the matters assigned to them. After approval in the matter software by one of our attorneys, the system generates multiple cXML files each day that we pick up from the providers FTP site and load on our app server. The invoices are routed to cost center managers for approval.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:56:57 GMT

We have some Vendors who are expressing some concern about the trend in Non-PO Invoice processing that is more and more requiring the supplier to provide the email address of the buyer employee who purchased the item because they are finding their AR systems are not always able to work well with capturing the "Ordering Email" or their order processing system isn't sending the email over to the Vendor's AR system so they just don't have the email address. More and more are being asked to provide the email as proof that the Non-PO invoice was ordered by a true buyer employee. Also, in Europe there are a few buyers who for German Privacy law reasons are trying to avoid giving out employee email addresses. Just FYI, as we also expand our Non-PO functionality we are also learning that there are some challenges in the Vendors AR system or their invoicing processes. That is both for sending electronic invoices and in some cases just including the employee email on a paper invoice.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:10:00 GMT

We are looking at doing just that. Our current non-PO invoice process requires it, although there are some categories that may be routed to a central approver (facilities, taxes).

Our plan is to route the invoices to the responsible user for coding and approval using the Ariba workflow engine.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:33:24 GMT

Sounds like an excellent approach. I'm interested in how you were able to do the Utility Billing Suppliers as typically they are reluctant to provide electronic invoices directly. Anything unique you have done relative to these two Non-PO type Invoices that makes it possible for you to get those groups providing electronic invoices? Or do you still get the paper, but after you enter the paper you use your workflow process from the paper? I appreciate the dialog as both Non-PO and getting Utilities and Legal to do eInvoice are common problems for our customers.

RE: Non-PO Invoice Management - Some Thoughts

dont-reply@exchange.ariba.com — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:28:59 GMT

Actually, we work with an identified supplier and provide them the necessary details such as cost center, commodity code, etc. When the invoice is processed we have made some modifications to capture those important pieces of data, compare them against a special approver's table and if found add them to the approval flow, if not found then add the cost center manager and up the chain of command until signing authority is reached. So far we have enabled our utility billing supplier and out legal billing supplier.