We need a strong payables process so that it provides us with a high-productivity accounting solution to process vendor payments. An integrated payables process provides strong financial control so you can prevent duplicate payments, pay for only the goods and services you order and receive, and maximize supplier discounts. Understand the key features of an effective accounts payable system.
Given below are the key requirements from any automated world class accounts payable system:
Flexibility:
Payables system should provide flexibility for managing and streamlining invoice and payment processing. The flexibility is required in the areas of account structure, multiple calendars, multiple currencies, multiple bank accounts, multiple payment terms and how the system helps entering the information by defaulting linked information from the master data.
Accurate Invoice Processing:
Payables system should provide controls and automations to improve the efficiency of invoice processing and simultaneously help ensuring the accuracy of payables information. Some automation features or best practices are automatically matching an invoice to a purchase order by providing the purchase order number. Defaulting the accounting details and other information based on the matched purchase order.
Invoice Approvals:
As controllership and sox requirement the payable system should support two-, three- and four-way matching of purchase orders, invoices, receipts, and requester acceptance documents. Further it should provide approval mechanisms to ensure segregation of duties.
Multiple Payment Types:
System should provide capability to handle every form of payment, including manual payments, wire transfers, bank drafts, electronic funds transfers, and automatic checks. Further these payments should automatically or manually reconcile with the bank statements.
Supplier Interface:
System should enable resolve business issues quickly by providing immediate and accurate responses to supplier inquiries. Ability to view Invoice and Payment status information together to take informed decisions and have a meaningful conversation with the supplier.
Additional Information:
Ability to record detailed information about suppliers, including their purchasing, payment, and invoice processing preferences, flexible address formatting for global operations.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI):
This allows exchanging payables data with external parties like banks and suppliers. Ability to use EDI drastically reduces many manual steps.
Pay on Receipt:
This is a financials feature that automatically creates supplier invoices based on receipts and purchase orders information. An advanced feature will automatically create matched invoices, automatically approve invoices and then make EDI or other electronic payments to the supplier.
Open Interfaces:
Ability to bring procure to pay data from other systems to the payables system.
At a high level, the essential elements in a warehouse are an arrival bay, a storage area, a departure bay, a material handling system and an information management system. As part of the process for enabling a warehouse layout, you must define warehouse zone groups, and zones, location types, and locations.
Overview of Warehouse Processes
The basic function of a warehouse is to store goods. This means that they receive deliveries from suppliers, do any necessary checking and sorting, store the materials until it is dispatched to customers. Traditionally warehouses were seen as places for the long-term storage of goods. Now organizations want to optimize their customer experience and try to move materials quickly through the supply chain, so the role of warehousing has changed.
When products arrive at a facility, there need to be a defined process to let them in. The process for accepting inventory when it arrives is called "Receiving". Any warehousing operation must be able to receive inventory or freight from trucks at loading docks and then stow them away in a storage location. Receiving often involves scheduling appointments for deliveries to occur, along with unloading the goods and performing a quality inspection.
The Outbound process starts with routing the shipments. The Outbound execution process starts from the point when pick tasks are completed for an outbound shipment and ends at the point where the outbound packages are loaded into trailers. The Warehouse Outbound process includes managing and controlling outgoing materials starting from the download of orders through to the shipping of products from the warehouse.
One of the warehousing best practices that retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Target have adopted is known as cross-docking. During this process the inbound products are unloaded at a distribution center and then sorted by destination, and eventually reloaded onto outbound trucks. In real parlance, the goods are not at all warehoused but just moved across the dock (hence the name).
Types of Order Picking Methods in the Warehouse
There are many different types of picking in a warehouse and each one works as a customized solution for each business. Depending on the size of your warehouse and inventory, the manpower you have on hand, and the number of customer orders made each day, there may be certain methods that are more efficient for you than others.
What is a Warehouse & why companies need them?
All organizations hold stocks. In virtually every supply chain, gaps exist between when something is produced and when a customer is ready to buy or receive it. Stocks occur at any point in the supply chain where the flow of materials is interrupted. This implies that products need to be stored during this period of gap.
This article discusses the documents that gets generated during the procure to pay process. Undestand why these documents are created, what is their business significance and how they are handled and generated using ERP or automated systems.
When a customer wants a product that has been stored in the warehouse, the same need to be picked off the shelf (or off the floor) and get it ready for shipping. Depending on how big is the warehouse, picking can take a while. (Many distribution centers cover more than 1 million square feet.). Hence, warehouse order picking methods are an important aspect within any warehouse.
What is the difference between Warehouse Management & Inventory Management?
The terms “inventory management” and “warehouse management” are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably as they both deal with operations and products of industries. Despite their few similarities, there are many notable differences between warehouse and inventory management systems.
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