Hello Exchange Community!
We're looking for guidance or best practice advice on including an "Accounting" or "Finance" review on requisition or invoice approval workflows. Any firms out there that can provide insight and guidance is greatly appreciated.
Currently our Requisition approval flow is configured to include a Finance representative from the requester's department, not necessarily someone from the Accounting or Finance department. And our Invoice Reconciliation approval workflow currently has rules setup for 1-2 Accountants to review and approve invoices that meet the dollar threshold conditions for CapEx or Prepaid purchases only.
Accounting would like to open the scope of review to include all invoices prior to payment, by mapping line item General Ledger account codes to identified approval groups. However our Procurement group has several concerns with this and hesitates to move forward with this request.
Challenges identified by Procurement:
- Meeting standard payment terms: including an additional approver can cause a delay resulting in lost discounts
- SLA's around approval turnaround time: the first several business days of the month are the busiest for accounting due to month-end close. Approvers would have to commit to a less than 24 hours turn-around. And someone would be required to monitor this on a daily basis.
- Maintenance of the Approver mapping
- Not all invoices are processed through the Ariba P2P system
- Moving Accounting review to the Purchase Requisition process: most buyers need the PO generated yesterday. Again, a 24 hour SLA on approvals would be required and monitored.
- Overall SOX control of the process
Please feel free to send a private message if you don't feel comfortable posting your response to this discussion topic. Again, we're looking for any insight, guidance, stories and best practice from other Ariba P2P customers who have encountered this or a similar challenge.
Thank you,
Nancy