What is Vendor Invoice Management?
VIM was created to fill a gap that has always existed in SAP: the receipt and automation of supplier invoices.
As such, VIM allows us to reach a scenario like the following: all invoices, regardless of how or where they arrive, will have a single point of entry into the ERP: omnichannel. Upon receipt, the invoices will be already archived (in a repository compatible with ArchiveLink) and available in SAP throughout the entire process for later consultation (either in PDF, XML, etc.).
As a result, we will have a VIM document, with the same appearance and characteristics in all cases, and on which we will apply a series of automatisms and checks according to your internal policies and business rules, such as:
- Auto-completion of certain fields applying any logic on all the data that we have when the producto is working on the ERP itself: supplier masters, materials, orders, requests, merchandise entries, etc.
- 3-way-match, 2-way-match, automatic coding of invoices without order, etc.
- Tax checks on tax indicators, withholdings, and any other specific to the country in which we are located.
- Approval of invoices, before or after their posting, which allows to implement and guarantee compliance with company policies, and which is easily auditable since there is traceability of the entire process.
What are the Business Rules?
Let’s talk about the VIM Business Rules.
Once the invoice has already entered SAP and we can see it in our VIM work area, a series of Business Rules are executed adapted to the needs of each client. These Business Rules consisto f a sequence of checks applied to the invoice data. These checks are applied in order of relevance, from highest to lowest severity of the incident that prevents the accounting of the invoice. When a Business Rule is not fulfulled, an exception is generated to be resolved and the corresponding users are notified.
In the following image, you can see how the different Business Rules applied during the processing of an invoice would look like:
How do Business Rules work?
The way they work is at follows:
- Business Rules start when the OCR ends and the invoice enters VIM.
- When the Status appears in green, that Business Rule has been processed successfully.
- On the contrary, when we find it in red, it means that the invoice is stopped at that Business Rule, so that there is that in the invoice that needs to be corrected for it to be successfully posted.
- In the image below, you can see some “light bulbs” called By-pass. If these are clicked, you are telling the system that even though the invoice is stopped at that Business Rule, it can go to the next Rule. Although if the rest of Business Rules are ok, then, the invoice will be posted.
- The mechanisim to move to the next Exception or Business Rule is done by clicking on the “apply rules” button. Once we apply rules if we have made the appropriate changes regarding the Business Rules in which the invoice was stopped, this will cause us to go to the next Business Rule that appears in red or that the invoice is posted.
To explain how to resolve exceptions, we will consider the following classification of invoice exceptions, depending on the different resolution options:
As mentioned, when we have made the appropriate corrections, all the Business Rules will appear in green, and the invoice can be posted, either in the background (applying rules once all the Business Rules are green) or online (through MIRO).
If you want to know more, do not hesitate to contact us, we would be happy to show you a demo and tell you everything about VIM and how it works.
