Accounts Payable Firm

The firm manages incoming billing documents and accounts-payable work for clients, and the finance team received many documents needing review before payment. Not every document placed in the FMS billing area was a real invoice. Some were receipts, some were credit-card charges, and some were unrelated files that needed a different destination entirely. Staff had to read each document, identify the correct vendor, decide how it should be handled and update the FMS manually. Reading a document meant pulling vendor names, invoice numbers, dates, payment terms, amounts, departments and locations from it by hand, which is slow and leads to missing or inconsistent information. An invoice could not proceed normally when its vendor did not exist in the FMS, and the client then had to create the vendor and supply the required information before processing could continue. Credit-card charges needed deliberately different handling because they are already paid and should not enter the same payment cycle as an unpaid supplier invoice; treating both the same could create duplicate or incorrect bills. For valid invoices staff had to prepare a bill record, set it for review and keep a separate activity record, repeating all of it for every invoice. The client also needed a monthly view of processed invoices, missing-vendor cases, credit-card charges and invoices waiting for review.

Six steps give each document a clear path. An incoming billing document is prepared for review and its information read and organized. The document is then checked to decide whether it is an invoice at all, and a non-invoice is moved out of the billing process and marked for routing or review. For invoices, the vendor name is checked against the FMS; if the vendor is missing the invoice is marked as waiting for vendor information and the client is notified about the required action. When the document is a credit-card charge it is marked as already paid, given a clear credit-card reference and recorded separately for tracking, which is what keeps it out of the unpaid payment cycle. A normal invoice is prepared as a draft bill using the available vendor, invoice, amount, department and location information, marked as ready for staff review and added to the activity log. Once each month the activity records are counted and a summary is emailed to the client showing processed invoices, missing-vendor cases, credit-card charges and invoices ready for review.

Each incoming billing document is prepared for review and receives a decision showing whether it is an invoice or a non-invoice item, and non-invoice documents are marked for routing outside the billing process rather than processed incorrectly. A vendor check runs for every invoice, and a missing vendor produces a waiting status plus a client notification naming the required action. Credit-card charges are marked as already paid and recorded separately, so they no longer risk being treated as unpaid invoices. Normal invoices are prepared as draft bills with the available invoice information and marked as ready for staff review, with invoice and credit-card activity recorded for tracking. A monthly email summary reports invoice-processing and review counts so the client sees volume and exceptions without assembling them. The workflow is configured and tested but does not run on the main process until the supplied starting connection is completed and the workflow is activated, which is stated plainly rather than implied as live.

Client retains ownership of the FMS credentials, vendor and department data, the client notification address, the credit-card reference format, the monthly summary recipient list, and every workflow and draft-bill configuration.