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Customer Made Shipping Billing Invoicing Portal Problems

2,383 Views | 20 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by 94chem
Madman
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My company, a large manufacturer of industrial items, sells primarily to other large manufacturers who use my parts to build their equipment. Customers like GE, CAT, John Deere, etc.

Many of these companies demand we bill and invoice through the customers in house created portal. Every portal is different and always require some amount of training for our customer service reps to learn to use. And many of these portals have bugs meaning I don't get paid on time or similar.

My company has about 8000 direct customers in the US. What happens when just 1/8th of these customers demand we manage orders through a custom portal? The added cost would be huge and there is no way any company can be expected to conduct business thousands of different ways.

Does anyone else have similar experience with this issue?
Bob Knights Paper Hands
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Yes. Customer payment portals suck in general. I try to find a champion for each customer portal. Depending on people's ability they might champion multiple customer portals. Then they are in charge of making sure the invoices and all of the documentation needed gets sent. That gives them some ownership of the process instead of it falling on me or the accounting department.

We don't have 1,000 different customer portals so ours is more manageable.
Madman
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AG
We have about 100 today and average several new ones a month. At some point it will have to stop.
ABATTBQ11
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Business opportunity: Develop platform that talks to billing portals and sends indices from accounting/order tracking software.
Madman
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I thought the same thing. The programming would be possible, the hard part is selling it.
Dr. Horrible
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Ask them if their portal has an api you can use to submit invoices. Tell them if it does, it is a 15% price break. Raise prices by 15% for the ones that don't.
Deats99
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It is called Fintech in the Beer and Wine industry in Texas and all of the serious accounting, inventory, and shipping systems interface with it. The fact that no one has franchised it out is mind boggling.
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
-George S Patton
combat wombat™
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I HATE these portals. The companies I have experience with are generally slow to pay... then they add the portal. Any little thing that goes wrong in that process slows down their already slow payment process even more.
rodan85
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ABATTBQ11 said:

Business opportunity: Develop platform that talks to billing portals and sends indices from accounting/order tracking software.
Worked for startup that did this for insurance claims/body shop work in the Early 2000's. There is an opportunity for the right person.
FarmerJohn
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Assigning a cost for this kind of thing is the only answer. My company use to be great with our vendors. We were easy to deal with and paid quickly and on time. We got preferential treatment and lower prices because of that. Around the time we got a new CEO, and then really accelerating when the mantra of working capital really started to filter down, we became harder to deal with. The first was when our boiler plate T&C's moved payment from 30 days to 60 days. Frankly most of the buyers found out about it when the vendors that read that kind of thing started to holler. There was no announcement or straight forward conversation. It's continued since then.

Part of this is the obvious commercial side. We are getting our vendors to finance more of our work. But it's also a training issue. Previous buyers had a lot more freedom and with 20 years with the company really had close working relationships. Sometimes too close. But between layoffs and retirements, that knowledge base is gone. The users are now much less experienced and we provide little to no training on our systems. Some of this is because the managers of those systems really have no idea how they work, and sure aren't going to ask. Consequently, unless everything fits exactly in the right box, our people get lost.

In the end, our vendors hit us with increased prices and deliveries. Of course our managers called a meeting to want to know why. Our vendors explained and we shrugged our shoulders and just accepted it as there was nothing we could do, and really at the individual level there isn't anything you can do.
ABATTBQ11
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AG
rodan85 said:

ABATTBQ11 said:

Business opportunity: Develop platform that talks to billing portals and sends indices from accounting/order tracking software.
Worked for startup that did this for insurance claims/body shop work in the Early 2000's. There is an opportunity for the right person.


Construction could use it for all sorts of things because subcontractors, GC's, and owners all use different systems but pieces the same documents. If I were a developer or knew anything about startups, I'd do it.
FinanceWildcat
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This is something I've been ruminating on for about 2 years. We are in the commercial maintenance business, and our largest customers are big box stores or national third parties subcontracting work to big box stores.

Not only do these customers require invoice submission through their own system, they manage work orders through them as well. As a service provider, my company has to log work performed while on site (still called IVR even though the technology isn't over the phone) using a GPS enabled app in order for WOs to be invoiced and paid. Over the course of a night, a single driver services between 10 and 18 properties, and has to utilize 5 different IVR apps to check in and out of properties. This is in addition to their route sheets that are loaded on our routing program and pushed out to the iPads.

The result is an increase of 2-4 minutes per site every night, and across my 20 nightly routes, about 10 hours of added payroll just on technician time. Even with vendors who use the same WO platform (ServiceChannel), each requires us to use their branded app in order to receive credit for the service and in turn get paid. It's total BS and I've gone round and round with them about why in the end, the WO is completed in the root platform, but higher ups need to justify the investment on "their" app, so it's a losing battle.

I know just enough to understand that creating an app that calls each API and logs the IVR in the root platform, but has the appearance of using each individual app, is possible. I lack the knowledge and the cash to actually build it, but whoever created it will be a game changer in our industry.
Madman
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AG
Out internal look at the issue says its costing a lot of money. It's getting worse and everyone seems to lose. Us, our customer and the customer's customer all lose by my accounting.

But my big customers are not going to change until enough vendors find a way to effectively communicate that our prices are going to go up due to this extra cost of doing business.

The Collective
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I hate them. I'm looking at you Exostar (Lockheed Martin).
FarmerJohn
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Quote:

about 10 hours of added payroll just on technician time.
Just ran the numbers, and that's a pretty optimistic figure. This isn't hyperbole. Pretty eye opening.

As someone who is currently way more dependent on my vendors than they are on me, it would seem like a competitive advantage for a company to actually ditch these systems. But I'm just an engineer, so somehow I'm sure that causing everyone extra work makes money in the accounting world.
OldArmyBrent
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AG
We had to hire people to handle some of the more widely used invoicing systems (like Ariba). The worst part is that the vendor forces us to use it, but then we have to pay the company running Ariba (SAP?) a fee to be able to submit things based on a percentage of the total invoice amount. It's a racket and has increased costs on both sides.
combat wombat™
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That is a racket! You should NOT have to incur fees to pay your vendor.
94chem
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If only people had been able to buy and sell things before the internet and computers existed. If only... If only...
ABATTBQ11
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94chem said:

If only people had been able to buy and sell things before the internet and computers existed. If only... If only...


Do you have any idea what it costs to do business on paper versus digitally, in both time and labor?
NoHo Hank
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OldArmyBrent said:

We had to hire people to handle some of the more widely used invoicing systems (like Ariba). The worst part is that the vendor forces us to use it, but then we have to pay the company running Ariba (SAP?) a fee to be able to submit things based on a percentage of the total invoice amount. It's a racket and has increased costs on both sides.
Doubt your vendors are making you switch to Ariba. That's not how that typically works.

To start assessing total cost to process an invoice, you'd consider factors such as:

1. What is your average cycle time to process an invoice before and after?
2. What percent of your invoices need to be reconciled with manual intervention - i.e. PO or invoice contains an error and needs to be corrected before and after?
3. How often do these manual interventions preclude you from taking early pay discounts before and after?
4. How many FTEs do you have processing invoices before and after you transition?

As a buyer, the value proposition associated with Ariba invoicing is bringing in all your invoices digitally (not pdf, not fax, not scanned) into a single place across all buying channels (services, goods, direct/indirect, etc.) with set business rules that preclude your vendors from invoicing you incorrectly. In so doing, you prevent overcharges, double invoicing or multiple invoices attached to one PO line item, back dating leading to you paying early, and a host of other things.

Considering many of those friction points are hidden costs, its understandable that you may not see the benefit in your role, whatever that is, but digitizing PO and invoicing does not increase cost to process.
OldArmyBrent
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Respectfully disagree. My team spends 3X the hours on Ariba invoices. We are a huge firm, but yes, we have hired at least 6 people to handle Ariba invoices, and that is in addition to my team's extra time. Our clients can refuse to hire us without using Ariba, so yes they are forcing us. It may save time and effort on their side, but not ours. It allows for manipulation on the pay side, but not on the vendor side.
94chem
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ABATTBQ11 said:

94chem said:

If only people had been able to buy and sell things before the internet and computers existed. If only... If only...


Do you have any idea what it costs to do business on paper versus digitally, in both time and labor?


No. No I don't. I do know that one of the automatons at HQ told me that when I file my mandatory $11 expense report for the donuts I bought for a meeting, that it costs them $75 to process it. Whatever. I'd rather spend that on 18 holes at Tour 18, but I guess SAP wonks gotta eat too.
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