Discover the Open Invoice Example for Teams and Streamline Your Document Workflow

Open invoice example for teams

our presenter for invoice automation Michael rot thank you Chris so my name is Michael Ross I am senior marketing manager here at oiled X responsible for the open invoice product line I've been involved the open invoice product line for just over six years prior to as in product management and as well as training and some other areas and prior to that I've been a consultant with some IBM where I did some erp implementations so what I want to talk to you today is how you can use open invoice to make your life better and easier and streamline the stuff you're doing today's business environment turbulent had been turbulent for quite a while going all the way back to 2009 has the financial crisis put a crimp on the cash flows available ability to do different work and then 2014 tons of great productions blooming all these expanding invoice volumes and a lot of companies at that time the only way they could keep up with stuff is they just hired more people and they threw more bodies at the work and then last year this year you have the oil crash and suddenly lots of people are being laid off so what I want to do and talk to you about is how you can streamline become more agile and absorb those ups and downs by automating and not needing to throw more bodies but all the work when you're doing a manual process you've got a lot of trust that's involved and Trust is defined as to believe that someone or something is reliable good honest effective and it's sure reliance on the character of the ability or the strength of something and so in that manual process you're looking at your suppliers to invoice correctly coders allocate costs correctly the improvers to reconcile and approvers confirm the work is completed when you've got low produced volumes that's fairly straightforward but when you've got really high volumes a lot to be what is coming in and stuff going on seems our Russian people aren't necessarily able to reconcile everything and so or they may not have the right document reconcile to as with paper things get lost in the shuffle so here's how open invoice can help finance automation you reduce the drain on your limited resources so talking with a number of clients and folks over the last couple months I know that AP department accountable department have a number of folks that are just basically down to the bare bones skeleton crews as a result of that oil trash and as time and the environment is stabilizing and volumes are looking to pick up and things are improving they're getting quite concerned about being able to keep up the volumes so and the ability to manage that increase in demand in conjunction with all that there's a greater focus now in the company's I'm gaining cost control so 2014's many was kind of wild Bingley matters adult oil about 130 hundred forty dollars a barrel now that we're looking at that fifty dollar dollar barrel range you need to have much greater control you need better analysis and the ability to review and have more information to fingertips on the cost that you have incurred and automating reduces cycle times as well and when you reduce your invoice several times at the time it takes from when you receive the invoice when you pay it then you have the opportunity to earn early pay discounts and early pay discounts can have a big impact to your bottom line but if you're going to automate you need to be able to trust the system and trust needs to be built and just like in day-to-day and interpersonal relationships you have to trust the system and trust the rules that are embedded in the system so that invoices and items are being processed the way you expect them to ing to the rules you define and so one of the things that you can do is you can have the copied from trusted sources and you can build the rules and you can configure the system to do exactly what you want it to do in specific scenarios and don't start by just automating everything all at once start through incremental and build trust as you add more and more features so in open invoice we've got a series of different things that you can do all the way from how do you manage a dispute to full workflow automation and I want to spend the next few minutes with you or the next little bit with you talking through each of these options and how open invoice can help you save time and money by automating these different pieces so the first up is dispute management and this is really around how do you handle a dispute between yourself and your supplier and what we're proposing what we have available in open invoice is the ability to designate a team who reviews those disputes before it goes back to the supplier and one of the reasons you'd want to do that is let's say by a different Chris who's moderating our webinar for me and myself we're both approvers at a company and you know invoices are being coded and sent to us for approval and one of Chris's invoices is accidentally coded to my cost objects my ad my class center instead to me for approval what I'm looking at that invoice it doesn't belong to me it's not what I considered a valid invoice and so my first instinct is to dispute it so I disputed but back to the supplier will inspire saying I did the work this is a valid invoice why are you disputing it just because you coded it Ron and sent it to the wrong person so this teen would review those invoices and make that correction and send it to Chris without having to get that supplier involved which can save potentially days off of the cycle time because you're doing it internally and the squire does have to get engaged and make corrections and resend and it also helps maintain a good working relationship with your supplier the other scenario would be if you're doing scanning index invoices and so you've got you know a group of clerks that are typing in the information at office I'll scan documents and somebody makes a mistake or they send it to the wrong place well instead of having to go back to that indexer for them to correct and sometimes they may not know how to correct it or they may not have the information available if other team can review it potentially reach out to the supplier get the information needed and make the correction and again save that time you trust this because you've built the rule so you decide under which conditions would an invoice the Interceptor that dispute be intercepted instead to your internal team as opposed to the supplier and so because you've built the rules then you're able to have that control and Trust of the system the second piece I want to talk to you about is invoice recipient routing so this is really automating that mailroom and so think of it in terms of in the paper world suppliers are mailing you their paper invoices it comes to your central mailroom somebody opens the invoice they read it they decide who in the office to send it to and they walk around and send it well in the electronic world just sort of have the same thing you know you've got one of two ways of solving that problem one is you create all these different mailboxes for where you want view from invoices to go and your supplier has to pick the right place so you're trusting the supplier to you that the other scenario is or the other way of solving that is you have one mailbox that the supplier send everything to and then you have your receptionist or some other clerk that opens and reads every invoice and forwards that invoice the right team well this is a way of building rules so that you can and have that automatically go you're eliminating one touch and you're illuminating the time for that invoice to sit in that mailbox waiting for somebody to forward it and so you trusted it again because you're building the rules and then you can forward to a second department to a team or to a specific user or to the requisition ER and so based on the information on the invoice documents gets the right person at the right time and you're not caught with if you do have you know your receptionist or that clerk reviewing them and they're sit for a couple days or their own vacation you don't have things sitting and piling up and because you're eliminating that touch you're potentially cutting a couple of days on that cycle clock and every day counts to get to your early pay discounts once you have any boys is going to the right place the next step is looking at how you can get those invoices pre-coated and so what that means is that the invoice comes in with coding you're a FES your con centers your general ledger coding and it saves the time of your coding department to have to manually type all this stuff in it also is a way of taking the burden off of your supplier and making a supplier into this information because that's not their job that's not their core business and they don't necessarily know it and they're just want to try and put anything on to the invoice again it's not as possible so there's two ways that you can have your invoices pre-coated one is through source documents and so this is where if you're using field tickets or purchase orders you can get that coding on to those documents and then when the invoice is created and references those documents open invoice and automatic and comedies that coding over to the invoice so you enter it up front and as documents work through the process that get copied over the alternate way is through something called smart coding and this is where you define the attributes of the invoice you care about so that the supplier is the specific product and service is it the ASE the cost Center and open invoice learns the corresponding coding as you work through the invoices and as you move invoices through your workflow so that the next time an invoice comes in with that same set of attributes open invoice can automatically apply the coating it learned and save you having to enter the general ledger coding so the reason you can track this is because when it's a field ticket your field supervisor has reviewed and improved the coding on that ticket this is no different than if they were to take a paper ticket and hand write the coating on it and the stamp and give it to the supplier well instead of doing that now they enter it into the open invoice system and then if there you're eliminating the suppliers and having to retype it and it gets copied over to the invoice on the purchase order side its trusted because you're identifying the coding as part of your repetition process so when you generate the purchase order you are actually assigning the coding for that purchase order line so the products and service the AV dissociation center and then when the supplier send in the invoice and references that line the coding is automatically copied over so again a supplier doesn't need to know it they don't have to play it in for you and it gets done in the platform someone the invoice shows up to your accounts payable team is pre-coated smart coding is considered a trusted source because you define the rules an open invoice learns the coding based on your real data so as you you defined the roles and as you process the invoices through accounts payable and coat them approve them open invoice learns and save that coding that you've specified and it applies it on the very next time the invoice comes in now that you've got your invoices coated the next step is compliance and compliance has two different flavors to it there's data validation required field making show you about the right information and then there is also reconciliation so data validation you are able to define look up lists and open invoice and the relationships between these fields and then you can figure the fields that have to be populated each step of the work form so it gives you the flexibility to define your your data environment how you need and what you need to move invoices forward from a reconciliation and compliance perspective if the field ticket purchase orders and price books or contracts are an open invoice then open invoice is able to automatically compare documents and generate alerts this eliminates the need for somebody and accounts payable or for your improvers to do a manual line-by-line reconciliation and make sure that you've got that three or four way match between your documents so I'm going to talk a little bit more about reference data the data validation so things like avi's cost centers general ledger codes your work order your field lease information and any other companies formation feels that you've got you can upload and define the allowed values and by doing that that protects your ERP so that you're guaranteed only a value in your ERP and has configured to be allowed in your ERP will come in on the invoices and so you can use open invoice sort of as that gatekeeper and data validation and you can also define the valid combinations of data so if a specific AFE is entered on an invoice then only postures a and B can be associated with it and again that helps protect your ERP and from bad data coming in and needing to have these data corrections in the ERP you're able to manage it in open invoice and get the data validation and feedback at the time of the coding in terms of required fields so this is where you decide when specific information is required on an invoice in order to satisfy your business needs in your ERP again if you put this in open invoice you guarantee that you've got the right information when you need it prior to something going to the ERP so there's a couple of different ways of doing this one is you can just say this field is always required and examples of that would be you know if you always need an AFE on everything invoice from every supplier they need to turn on a preference and make it required for everybody the next level down whether the next sort of flexibility is the ability to make it required a specific workflow steps so you might say you have to have an AFE on code verify and approved but the suppliers are able to skip the invoice without it and that gives the suppliers the ability to if they don't know the value they can submit the invoice and the person in your company who knows the value can go in and add it instead of forcing the supplier to put information that they ought necessary have similarly if it's something for approval or versus code verify you can make sure that it's the right person in the right step of your workflow that the data is being entered and then finally you can make a field required based on relationships with other data fields so for example if a is e1 requires a purchase order but aac2 does not you're able to set that up on a data wipe data piece and there's a number of different options you've got available so you can make it av's required cost centers and cost centers require general ledgers and purchase order it wide variety of options available to you but the goal is being able to make sure that at the end of the day you bought the right information the right combination of information and the information you require prior to the invoice getting into your ERP so that you've got this valid invoice when it leaves open invoices the next step from required fields and data validation is starting to look at compliance this is where you are reconciling your invoice to your source documents that feel tickets that purchase orders price book and you're looking to get that three and four way match you do this manually and you hope that your teams are doing this manually you're trusting them to do it manually and accurately but it's very time-consuming if an invoice references five field tickets you need to have something to do the math and manually align all these different values with open invoices you've got all the data in the system that open in what does all that for you automatically and generates an alert of visual a key that this has been reconciled and it at a glance your approvers can tell there's a problem or not and so green is good the invoice matches there's no discrepancies you can process this invoice and let it go through red is a major issue something like a rate viral difference or a pricing mismatch or something along those lines yellow that warning is something that you don't necessarily want to just auto approve an invoice for but it's also not sometimes you want to auto dispute it's something you would want something somebody in your company to review and follow up and make sure that it is valid so examples of that could be a item that's on the invoice that isn't part of your contract or does it doesn't exist in the contracts it might be doubt it might be a third-party charge but you aren't able to just have this automated reconciliation you want somebody to review it and make sure it is reasonable and those compliance alerts the automated reconciliation is something that you can use to lead into workflow automation and workflow automation is where you really start to have invoices move through your workflow automatically without somebody having to manually intervene and click a button or take action and so you can entrust workflow automation because you're defining the rules so you define explicitly under what scenarios do you want something to auto dispute do you want something to be automatically code verified or financial approval and there couple of different things that you can do here one is you can define the rules to determine whether invoices are processed in open invoice or your ERP so an example of that would be if some of your invoices have purchase orders and some do not then you need to find a rule that says if the invoice comes it in and it's got a purchase order and matches the purchase order so open invoice doesn't detect any discrepancies then let it flow through the ERP for vulture matching and goods receipt matching and make sure that it is valid and automatically processed that in the ERP but for my invoices that don't have a purchase order I want them processed and opening but I want somebody to review them code them do that financial approval and only after all of that's done stick it to my ear p4 posted the other thing that you can do through workflow automation is auto dispute or auto could verify or automatically do a financial approval so on disputes a way of if you've got your price book your purchase order your field ticket in opening wasn't you detect there's a red alert and so that's a major issue you can define a rule that will have that automatically disputed to the supplier nobody in your office needs to touch it or review it it's just that Baxter just supplies you're not going to accept that automatically code verified invoices and automatic of financial approval these are different things that you can do and add-on complexity so something to consider if you want to do workflow automation is you really need to work with your auditors to gain the trust of the automated workflow so number of clients say no we can't do any automated approvals because our auditors won't accept it that and so it's needing to work with them working with them to understand the rules and the checks that are in place in the system and how open invoice is tying in to your other systems for example are you issuing purchase orders and so you've got a robust requisitioning an approval process up front that authorizes that spin and so that is on the invoices within that and it complies to the purchase order do you really need a person to click a button to say financial it's financially approved or if you buck field tickets and you've coated the field ticket and that Cody is combi to open in to the invoice an open invoice says this coating is identical there's no discrepancies from what the last person saw do you really need a person to click the button to say the coatings valid or can you just automate that step and move it through to the next step of the workflow when you're talking about adding automatic financial approval start with your low value invoices from your trusted suppliers so these are the ones that's going to cost you more to process it then it would cost you if there was an error and then you can work the auditors identity here to do that reconciliation the other thing that you considering you're automating if those that have a successful match so do you have and this is a match to more than one document so price book with a field ticket or price book in the purchase order or purchase order in a field ticket so make sure you got three way match you've got Green across the board and then use that to move things through in an automated fashion when you take advantage of all this automation the savings can be substantial and there's two types of savings there's your labor savings and the ability to realize more early take discounts the labor savings come in with every touch if you can reduce the number of touches on an invoice so whether that be eliminating the need for a clerk to review the invoice and forward it that reduces your labor costs but it also reduces your cycle cost your cycle time and if you can cut your cycle time down substantially then you're able to earn more more early pay discounts and it's not just the invoices that you automate that have the ability to get reduced cycle time because you're doing less work on those invoices or those invoices are automating they're moving through the process that means your valuable resources are able to process the other invoices you can't automate quicker because they've got less they need to review and so that means this potential to get those through the system faster as well and you can get early pay just comes across everything and Herman Cain doesn't sound like a lot and but it is you know if you've got two percent discount on your stand well if you're spending a million dollars a year you're starting to look at some substantial savings and so just by being able to automate cut that cycle time and reduce labor costs it will help you be competitive and will help you get ready for the increased volumes now that our environment has stabilized and work is starting to pick up so at this time I'd like to open it up for any questions so crisp if you could read through the questions for me that would be greatly appreciated sure actually Michael we don't have any questions at this time all right let's just give it a moment or so there's not any questions again there's a feature on the GoToWebinar panel that you can use its labeled question all right what I'll do is I will leave you with some final thoughts and if you've got a question I'll give you some contact informations you can follow up with afterwards so you really want to automate to save time and money and the keys here are reduced the risk fraud so if you put automated reconciliation then you're reducing the likelihood of price leakage and fraud because you're catching it up front before your audits if you're automating your workflow so that those things that are matched and are proven to be compliant are moved through then your valuable resources can focus on the exceptions and r you can you can process a lot more and handle more volume without having to add headcount if you're getting the invoice is the right person or team up front again you're not having to have somebody manually review everything and you've not have stuff sitting two or three days before you even start processing them we spend less time coding invoices you're reducing data entry you're reducing the likelihood of air because you're getting things done up front and validated early it reduce your administrative loads and improve your data quality every time you have somebody rekey something you're introducing the likelihood of human error and so the more that we can automate and get that data in place early the better your data quality which means you're reporting and your analysis will get better as I've mentioned you can cut your cycle times and earn more early paid discounts and then finally by doing all this automation and having these tools in place you really improve your supplier collaboration and in a couple of ways that that comes into play one they're able to focus on their job and they're not worrying about getting your coding onto your invoice because they the system can do it because you also are reducing the amount of work they have to do to get invoices to the right place when you're reducing cycle time and you're getting stuff to them fasten your pain and factor that improves the relationship that you've got look down and then finally just having that better automated system that they can come and they can get a self look up and they can look at the status of stuff in the again improve that relationship so at this point if there's no questions Chris are there any questions and no not at this time all right then I would like to thank everybody for your time for more information feel free to contact info @ o dexcom or follow us on linkedin facebook and twitter thanks again everybody have a great afternoon