Invoice Lifecycle

The Asignet Platform provides you a holistic environment of your billing vendor accounts, where you can manage all of your communication data and expenses in a single application. It delivers evidence-based insights you need to detect and respond to changes that drive excess costs; and provides you with streamlined and effective processes that span from invoice receipt to payment.

Using the platform to support your company's invoice lifecycle simplifies access, and management across your vendors and services in one platform.

Summary

The Invoice Lifecycle is managed through an “Inbox-Paybox-Archive” process in the platform. All invoices that are ready for consumption are posted to the Inbox; here you will review, validate, and approve the invoice.

Once the invoice is approved, it advances to the Paybox stage where it is considered ready for payment. At this stage, the platform will produce an Account Payable export file and deliver it to the Client's AP department / system so the invoices can be paid.

Finally, after the invoice has been exported, it advances to the final stage: Archive. The invoice will remain in Archive for reference in reporting or historical research.

Key Benefits

Platform capabilities

Benefits to you

Data capture from any vendor and media type

Validation of each invoice against previous billing, inventory data, order activity, and account requirements using configurable rules

Assignment of invoice charges to your cost allocation hierarchy

Feed to the client’s accounts payable system

Standard invoice presentation, regardless of vendor or media type

Allows users to manage by exception

Automatically flags discrepancies reducing manual work efforts

Ensures approved ledger codes are used to allocate charges each month

Automates the invoice AP export process for timely payments

Understanding the lifecycle in the platform

During Implementation, we gather your accounts and invoices to build your communications data and expenses environment in the platform. Invoice management is a key cornerstone to our platform and will drive not only billing validations, but many of the inventory and ordering validations as well.

Your invoice lifecycle starts with the vendor generating an invoice, whether it's paper, CD, or electronic media. The vendor provides all the invoices to Asignet for processing where our experienced Invoice Operations team processes all received invoices, conducts Quality Assurance (QA) checks to ensure data quality, and then posts the invoices to the Inbox, where it's visible to you in the platform.

The Asignet Platform provides the tools for you to review invoice charges, billing and account validations, and supporting details where applicable. For each account, you determine how the invoice charges should be allocated and what ledger codes to use for each invoice.

We support approval workflows for your invoices as well; you may designate a single approver for your invoices, or create an approval hierarchy (called Multi-level Approval).

Once approved, the invoice advances to the Paybox in the platform where it's considered ready for payment. Our platform supports several payment processes in the Custom Financial Report module:

Manual export:users will select invoices ready for payment and will create the AP export file upon demand
Automated export: the platform will export invoices at a set frequency, determined by your company. For example, each Wednesday at 5PM (ET) all invoices in the Paybox are exported for payment and an AP file is created and delivered to a designated FTP, email, or company AP system.

Finally, invoices move to Archive for record keeping purposes. You can use our reports and dashboards to review and analyze your invoice data any time.

How invoice data enhances your platform environment

Elements	Impacts to the platform
Electronic media receipt	Electronic media provides our users with more invoice detail, like line item detail or call detail. You can allocate at a lower billing level, like Subaccount or Service ID. Experience faster invoice receipt.
Service IDs	Track status for your billing items and receive notification when inactive items still bill. Assign GL codes to your lines so they allocate to the correct cost center each month. Use dynamic allocation for Service IDs and derive the ledger code based on the employee-to-Service ID assignments.
Line item detail / Billing item detail	See individual line item charges, like MRC service, fees, taxes, device charges, ETF charges, and more! Set contract rates per line item for monthly validation at a line item level. Validate requested service changes captured in order activity based on current billing.
Invoice identification information (i.e. invoice date, invoice number)	Get notified for potential missing invoices based on the account's last invoice receipt date or invoice date Prevent duplicate invoice loads & payment.