Let’s take a moment to elaborate on the importance of vendor portals to the AP and procure-to-pay process. In short, they are extremely important, not only for onboarding vendor purchasing information and enabling vendors to interact with payments, but also because the efficiency they provide helps your accounts payable department ensure everyone is getting paid on time, which oftentimes carries the added benefit of on-time payment discounts. Especially for large organizations, this can be a huge cost-saver over time.
Working with so many different organizations, RPI is fortunate to be in a unique position where we see common issues and patterns of issues our clients experience. We want to help them address these issues through a holistic procure-to-pay solution, which is where our Yoga Content for AP Vendor Master comes into play – not only as a vendor portal, but for the vendor extraction models too.
Once we build these extraction models, the invoices in your system don’t change regardless of if a vendor sends them to one organization or another. As your solution matures, there should be very few novel invoices in your top volume vendors, as these will already have their own models.
Another interesting thing about portal applications is they are an easy pathway to e-invoicing. While the rest of the world actually does this very well, the United States - at least up until very recently – has lagged behind other countries. For example, Mexico has a standard XML format for electronic invoice exchange that many of the European and APAC governments mandate. This allows the VAT and other taxes to be run through the government before a business gets paid so the government knows that the correct amount of taxes have been paid on every single invoice.
Thankfully, the Federal Reserve in the United States has been running a pilot program this year around an e-invoicing network for B2B payments to simplify and make payment processing more secure, with the hopes of going live in 2023.
Next week, we will discuss more of the advantages of using Yoga Content for AP. See you then!
