Many large organisations consume a supply of commodities that generate very high volumes of accounts payable transactions for items of low unit value. Examples of these include courier charges, print charges, stationery supplies, mobile phones and temporary labour hire.
The manual effort of handling these accounts, making sure they represent legitimate expenses and allocating them to the correct cost centre and account line is often so excessive that few controls can be effectively imposed.
Fortunately most major suppliers of such commodities can deliver a direct file of transactions that represents their “invoices” on a monthly account straight to the end customer. These files look just like the file of credit card transactions that banks supply, and can be easily loaded into ProMaster.
Once loaded, these files can be reviewed, authorised and allocated by authorised users of ProMaster, just like any other transaction. Rules for automatic processing can even be set up if users don’t wish to check every transaction. Once processed, they are ready to be automatically posted into corporate accounting systems at a chosen level of cost centre and account and to flow into accounts payable systems. A range of reconciliation reports can also be produced within ProMaster as an additional financial control.
As an added bonus, ProMaster will preserve all the explanatory data that a vendor provides – unlike typical accounting systems which strip most of the meaningful descriptions out of vendor files, making the accounting system a very difficult tool to use for line item review.
ProMaster e-invoicing is a brilliant solution to the challenge of controlling and accounting for the high volume commodities that have traditionally cost more to handle than the dollar value presented on the invoice.