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Accounts Payable

Your organization may not be able to achieve cost efficiencies – or establish a competitive advantage in your value chain processes – when financial transactions become clogged with paper, disconnected data and legacy processes. According to Meta Group, “sixty percent of the clerical effort in a typical finance organization is spent on inefficient paper processes that accompany financial transactions such as bill payments and collections management.” You may also find that your financial executives don’t effectively enlist the support of non-finance personnel to resolve problems, and core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems may fall short when handling unstructured content alongside accounting transactions.

As a result, your business must find ways to scan, store, view, deploy and integrate unstructured data with core financial applications – to close the loop for financial processes. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions solve these challenges by allowing you to:

• Integrate financial documents into SAP processes

• Automate the booking for PO-based invoices

• Efficiently resolve invoice exceptions

• Control and optimize the payment through payment audits and a solution to manage the lockbox

• Ensure that required participants get involved in the creation process via a master data management module

Open Text solutions deliver this functionality with the following components:

• Software:

• Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

Supplemented by Business Content (e.g., predefined workflows) to give you a head-start in configuring workstreams and processes, Consulting Services, Training and Support tailored to meet your requirements.

Activities

Accounts Payable involves Automated Invoice Capturing & Processing, Invoice Approval, Invoice Exception, Invoice Reporting, Payment Audit, Travel Expense Management and Vendor Self Service.

• Automated Invoice Capturing & Processing

  Your accounting department typically devotes much time and resources to manually entering invoice data into the ERP system – verifying the accuracy and correcting errors before the system can process the invoices. (In fact, up to 10 percent of all manually processed invoices contain inaccuracies!)
  
  

  Open Text’s solution corrects this problem with these features:
  
  

  • Integration in SAP solutions

  • Optimized invoice processing, by automating data entry and matching invoice data to corresponding accounts and purchase orders, and mapping it to an SAP transaction. (That means one employee can easily process 100 incoming invoices from purchase orders in two hours, even ones with lengthy itemized lists.)

  • Capturing costs reduced by 50 percent

  • Automated PO-matching, so that human interaction is eliminated

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Invoice Approval

  Long process times can result when your staff manually sends invoices through various steps in the approval process, across departments and regional offices. That, in turn, can result in missed due dates, forfeited cash discounts, and higher labor costs.
  
  

  Open Text’s solution integrates electronic documents in SAP solutions, so that:
  
  

  • Approval workflows decrease processing time by typically 70 percent, to ensure cash discounts

  • An electronic approval process is the basis for further cost savings by establishing SAP Shared Service Centers

  • Time for invoice approval (inside and outside SAP) is decreased

  • Compliance is addressed by long-term archiving of invoices

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Invoice Exception

  Typically a quarter of all incoming invoices have problems that need clarification. These invoices create 80 percent of the overall cost per invoice. Common problems include: the need for approval or special tax treatment; GR not in the system; and lines on the invoice not matching the lines on the purchase order.
  
  

  Open Text’s solution tackles each of these problems with the following features:
  
  

  • Integration in SAP solutions

  • Best practice’ workflows for invoice exception handling

  • Addresses compliance transparent business process and archiving

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Invoice Reporting

  Invoice reporting gives Accounts Payable managers the ability for complete and accurate reporting on the status of payables. The Open Text solution includes these features:
  
  

  • Financial officers can determine status, liabilities, trends and other statistics that aid in verifying and certifying financial reports

  • All A/P information is available for internal or external auditing, with a level of detail that leaves nothing undisclosed

  • Automatic analysis and detection of duplicate invoices allows organizations to eliminate duplicate payments

  • Automated monitoring and capture of possible discounts, enabling management to optimize capital

  • Monitoring of the invoice process, from start to finish, looks at bottlenecks, cycle time, first-pass yield and accurate liability

  • Integrated in SAP solutions

  • Optimizes cash flow and eliminates errors

  • Consolidated information on one screen

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Payment Audit

  The Open Text Payment Audit solution is a fast-to-implement solution integrated in SAP ERP. Its features include:
  
  

  • The ability to check outgoing payments at a random basis

  • Gives financial department managers a tool to audit the accuracy of Accounts Payable transactions

  • Blocks a predefined percentage of outgoing payments per clerk (a workflow is started for each blocked payment, so that managers can approve the payment to be made)

  • Improved visibility of your organization’s lockbox, with the benefits of document imaging

  • Associated documents linked with a check in the lockbox for easier processing

  • Imaging increases process monitoring throughout the processing in the lockbox

  • Tracks the status of checks in your lockbox and enables better monitoring

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Travel Expense Management

  Open Text’s ECM solutions let your organization manage employee expense report processing for travel and one-off expense-related items. These items include integration with corporate credit card vendor records for automated receipt management, and imaging solutions for out-of-pocket expense receipts, with process integration for manager approval and posting to your ERP system.
  
  

  The Open Text solution includes the features:
  
  

  • Image capture and processing

  • Credit card statement capture and processing

  • Workflow routing for review, approval and exception handling

  • Integration to accounts payable

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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• Vendor Self Service

  The Open Text solution for Electronic Bill Presentment is integrated in a complete Accounts Payable solution. Vendors can submit invoices online and monitor invoice payment status from any location. This virtually eliminates vendor status calls, duplicate invoices, and mismatched invoices, and reduces volume in Accounts Payable.

  
  

  • Solution Adaptations: Accounts Payable for SAP® Solutions, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Livelink ECM - Accounts Payable for JD Edwards World

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