At Brait we have implemented many VIM projects based on their standard form to approve financial invoices that reach accounts payable departments.
When we treat financial invoices, we impute them to various elements of expenditure and we have the configuration that the solution gives us to direct the invoices based on types of expense and amounts that we assign in the system manually:
But sometimes, due to the complexity of the companies or by their own criteria we can see customers in which a step beyond the standard solution is needed.
That is why in this entry of our blog we show you that VIM can be 100% adaptable to the criteria of your company and therefore we talk about another approval model based on the organizational structure and the occupation plan of a company that from Brait we have carried out in some of our clients.
Many companies have an organizational structure composed of numerous organizational units, within which hang positions and within the same different people (perhaps the images of hats, people, jobs reminds you a little more 😉):
After all, within an SAP organizational structure we find people who hang from positions and organizational units to which SAP allows to grant hierarchical levels and among other options assign amounts due to the position occupied by the person (user, manager, manager …). From Brait we have carried out developments in the standard approval for be able to send invoices dynamically to a user assigned to a cost center and climb hierarchically in the organizational structure of the company until you find the employee, manager, manager or CEO who can approve this invoice based on amounts and cost centers.
With this we get an approval, for example, based on the allocation of the expense (for example, cost center) and amounts simultaneously, making the approval efficient, guaranteeing traceability in our system and finishing the process when we find the corresponding person and with sufficient amount in our structure to be able to approve an invoice and that it is released for payment based on the hierarchical levels of your company.
But what if our company does not have updated all the cost centers to be able to carry out this type of approval? What if we receive an invoice where we charge an expense to a cost center, but we want it to be approved by someone else in another organizational unit? We have also found cases in which no person responsible for a cost center really has their own knowledge of an invoice and we have reviewers who have it, could a reviewer approve and then the person responsible for it?
From Brait we also contemplate these options and our dynamic development allows us to cover the different casuistries of a company and be able to approve the invoices according to the need. That is why we have several approval scenarios:
- Standard:our invoices will follow approval flow based on the cost center where we impute the expense (responsible for the cost center of the invoice > rise hierarchically in the organizational structure until we find a user with enough amount to be able to approve and release for payment the same).
- Manual:we send the invoice individually to a user, even if he is not responsible for a cost center. If this user does not have the ability to approve that amount, we go up the hierarchical level to find the person responsible for it dynamically, without manual intervention.
- Overwritten: although in our invoice we impute an expense to a cost center, we want it to be the person responsible for another cost center who approves the invoice and not what it should be (scenario in which we do not have, for example, responsible in a cost center). Reviewer: We can send the invoice to a reviewer and the person responsible for it is determined as the next level in a dynamic way.
- Nominative:invoices for example from a supplier are always approved by the same user. Here a clear example is telephone bills. We can have more than 100 lines on an invoice, with 100 different cost centers where the phone bill is imputed but we want it to always be a user who approves them.
With our solution for dynamic invoice approval we respond to the needs of many of our customers whose requirement is not covered by the standard, also benefiting from what gives us, by definition, a standard solution: simple, fast and smooth implementation in upgrades.
If you want to know how we can help you or have any other questions, please contact us, we will be happy to help you.
