Assessing Invoices – From A to Z
Within your organization, invoices are processed digitally, exported to your financial system, and from there, the invoices are actually paid. By using the Spend Cloud, everything is digitized, and the process is optimized, allowing you to free up more time for other tasks. But what does all of this mean for you as an invoice assessor? This article will explain the entire process from the perspective of an assessor.
How will I know if I have a pending action?
Within the Spend Cloud, you will receive a notification email for any pending actions. How often and when these notifications are sent can be found in the following article.
In addition, you can always find your pending actions on your dashboard. In the image below, you can see that this employee has 8 invoices waiting to be assessed.
Assessing the invoice
An invoice can be assessed in two ways: via the web version or by using the Spend Cloud app. The links will direct you to articles that provide more detailed explanations about assessing invoices.
Within the Spend Cloud, the roles for assessment are linked to an authorization amount. This means that even if you have approved an invoice, it may still need to be approved by someone else. The invoice moves through the assessment process until it reaches an employee whose role and corresponding authorization amount are sufficient to give the final approval.
Requesting an opinion
If you want to assess an invoice but still have a question about it, you can use the “Request opinion” button.
When requesting an opinion, you can either use the list of employees who have an account within your Spend Cloud environment or manually enter an email address.
Once you have requested an opinion, it’s simply a matter of waiting for a response. As soon as you receive a reply to your request, you will get a notification email.
The correspondence of the requested opinion and the response to it is stored under “Correspondence”. This way, other colleagues who also have the rights to view this invoice can stay informed.
Can correspondence be deleted afterwards?
No. A requested opinion and the replies to it are recorded with the invoice and cannot be edited or deleted afterwards – not by the sender and not by an application administrator either. The correspondence is part of the audit trail of the invoice: this way it always remains traceable which question was asked and which answer was given.
The correspondence therefore stays visible to every employee who is allowed to view the invoice, also after the invoice has been approved and is in the invoice processing archive. Only if the invoice itself is deleted from the Spend Cloud does the related correspondence disappear with it.
Keep this in mind when writing an opinion request or a reply to it: do not include (privacy) sensitive or confidential information that does not belong with the invoice. Once sent, a message cannot be withdrawn.