Vendor Invoice Tracking and Management

Most of the large organizations have commercially available ERP’s as from Oracle or SAP deployed for Finance and/or material management.

These ERP’s cater well to automate the complete process of initiating the purchase requisitions, issue of Purchase Orders, Material Receipt via Good Receipt Notes and release of financial payments.

The GAP when the organizations use the ERP’s for their projects is the following:

1. Each Project is unique and involves several types of payments as Advance Payment, Bank Guarentees (Advance, Performance, etc), Payment against receipt of material, Retention Amount etc.
2. The documentation requirements for clearing of the invoices for various types of payments are different and many projects have special government exemptions - as UMPP’s etc – of excise, Service Tax, VAT etc - for which documentation is required.
3. Further – depending upon the type of the payment, the approval process may be different as the invoice may have to be transferred to various disciplines and site officials for certifications.
4. Conventionally – the Purchase Requisition to Purchase Order and from receipt of Certified bill to Payment release cycle are in ERP’s. The Process associated with the receipt of invoice to its certification and handing over to Finance team is outside the system and is best done with hardcopy exchanging various hands for certification.
5. The process of physical movement of the bills is time consuming and is error prone – with delay happening in the certification process. People sometimes can even deliberately delay the process.
6. Due to delay in payments, can affect adversely the performance of contractors as well as can delay in the project.

To bridge the gap between the conventional ERP systems in the Payment Process, tBits Invoice tracking module was created with the following objectives:

1. Elimination of physical interface to submit the invoices. The invoices can be directly uploaded into the system by the vendor or emailed at a specified email address to be captured by the application. The physical copy of the invoice can be submitted later.
2. Compliance with the documents requirements to process the invoice.
3. No Movement of the Physcial Copy for certification of invoices. The scanned copied are uploaded and used by the teams to do needful.
4. Complete transparency and accountability – the workflow of the certification of invoices can be different for different projects and
5. complete compliance with the project workflows. Further – all stages of the workflow are monitored with reminders and escalations to ensure that the delays – if any – are minimized.
6. Integration with the existing ERP’s for fetching information related to the Purchase Orders, Good Receipt Notes and Payment information.

Benefits:

1. Real time visibility about the status of invoice to all agents – including the vendor, Project Director etc.
2. Reminders and Escalations to ensure that delays are minimized in invoice certification and complete payment being processed within the contractually agreed time-spans.
3. Complete e-enablement of the invoice tracking aspects by bridging the GAP as is there in the ERP Applications.
4. Reduced Errors in documentation and other validation checks on invoices as per Purchase Orders terms and conditions.
5. Ensuring Timely payments to build relationships and leaverage them for project.