Jaros

A customer of ours had recently purchased our product and one of the modules they purchased was Accounts Payable. The company was running Oracle® E-Business Suite (EBS) and the manager in charge of payables complained about the lack of visibility to information and reporting in Oracle EBS.

Some of the questions that he wanted answers to were:

1. Who is using this supplier and why?
2. What is the spend with each supplier?
3. Are we using our preferred suppliers?
4. Are our contracts being utilized?
5. What is our IPV?
6. What is the status of an Invoice? Where is it in the workflow process?
7. Which supplier’s invoices are coming due? Can I get this in an aging format?
8. Who are my active vendors?
9. What is my payment activity?
10. Show me all early payment invoices in order to realize discount taken percentages for early payment.

And the list of questions could go on and on. A good start in AP reporting is an invoice and payment transaction register that provide flexibility in reporting. ERP supplied reports are often static and very cumbersome to use. By supplying a flexible transaction register report with prompt capabilities in the customers preferred format, spend visibility is clear. In this case, the customer wanted to see detailed transaction register reporting by cost center. The customer also wanted exception reporting to show checks over a specified amount. In addition, when looking at checks, they wanted to see all invoices that were included on a specific check. One of the key benefits of the reporting solution, which the customer saw immediately, was a savings with respect to shipping payments. Accounts Payable reporting indicated that payments were being made to a shipping company that seemed to be higher than they should be. Upon further analysis, the customer realized that a negotiated shipping contract was not being utilized and that they were paying over $60,000 per month in overage charges. They quickly made the adjustment. Their VP of Procurement stated that they had paid for Jaros Analytics in real ROI in just a few months. In addition, the solution allowed the customer to see what invoices can be paid to realize the “discount taken” percentage for early payment. This resulted in real savings.

We have another customer that runs over 40,000 reports through Jaros Analytics per month. AP Aging was an important AP report to them. In this particular case, they wanted to know when payments were going to happen verses knowing what vendor spend was after a payment occurred. Because of the flexibility in the AP Aging reporting area, they were able to bucket AP payments in numerous customizable buckets to meet their needs by any way they wanted, such as vendor or vendor type for example. In addition, they were able to snapshot each period end of their AP Aging over time to see if their open payments by vendor were on the rise or on the decline. This customer also utilized accrual reconciliation reporting, VAT Tax reporting, general monthly payment and PO activity reporting just to name a few.

Another important reporting area is Invoice Price Variance (IPV) because no one wants to pay more than the negotiated contract price. Again, IPV reporting capability in Oracle EBS is available, but can be cumbersome to use. Jaros’ solution is easy to use and provides detailed PO and Invoice information regarding the PO amount verses the invoice amount. The key is that the information is always at the detailed level and can be summarized however the customer needs it.