PO Generation & Reconciliation

Introduction

 A purchase order (PO) is a document that states the type and quantity of products being purchased by a customer. It also includes the price of each item, payment method, delivery date of the order, and other terms and conditions. Invoices are used in conjunction with purchase orders to indicate money owed by the buyer to the seller. Invoices, also commonly referred to as “bills,” “statements,” or “sales invoices”, usually describes the products that were delivered to the customer, the price of those products, and the payment terms. Once the PO and invoices are completed, Reconciliation of data takes place in which basically, team reconcile data received from various merchant or vendors.

Problem Scope:

Maintaining all PO & Invoices manually is a complex and hectic task for our client. Since the files are used for audit purposes, even the smallest error can lead to major challenges while showing the files to the auditor. Some of the challenges which occurred on the client-side while raising PO (Purchase order) & generating Invoices for the same were:

1. Generating PO & Sending it for Approval

To generate PO, users have to login into the various system and raise a PO against the product which they need to order. Sometimes multiple POs have to be raised which can be time-consuming. As multiple steps were required from raising a PO to sending it for approval, any late change or error found in PO, all the steps would have to be repeated from the beginning. Once PO is approved they send the PO to the vendor via post.

2. Reconciliation of Summary Report

User needs to maintain Excel report for the various PO as per product and to perform data massaging as every vendor provide the details in a different format which was the major drawback. Users reconcile the data of various vendor for the item which has been delivered and the pending PO. They also have to calculate how long PO will exist.

Before SheetKraft:

The operation team used to log in to multiple banking systems for raising PO (purchase order) & generating invoices. They manually fed all the entries for Raising PO  for a different product. Once the PO raised, they sent it to the higher authority for approval and finally, printouts of these PO & invoices were sent to the vendor.

Before SheetKraft Flow-chart PO Raise & Approval:

The user uses to maintain all these data in a summary report as well as they have to reconcile the data received from the vendor as well as data received from their IT department. The entire activity was being done manually by 2 members of the operations team following the maker checker model. The entire process was highly error-prone and used to take 7-8 hours daily

Before SheetKraft Flow-chart PO Reconciliation:

After SheetKraft:

The business team approached our expert automation team to solve the problems in the manual process and get it automated using SheetKraft. After reviewing the data and the working file of the business, our team designed a process flow with no human intervention. The user can directly feed the data by login into Sheetkraft where the PO (purchase order) Number is generated automatically & the rest of the data can be selected from a given dropdown list with preexisting options to choose from.

PO Raise & Approval Flow Chart

After automating with SheetKraft PO raise & Approval:

• Users will login into the Sheetkraft team & Select data against automatically Generated PO numbers.
• After feeding the data for the PO number, the user can start & automatically a mail is sent to a higher authority for approval.
• If a higher authority approves then a digital signature invoice Pdf is generated and sent via mail to the respective vendor.
• All the checks and calculations are defined and calculated by SheetKraft. After successful completion of the process, the business users receive a notification regarding the process completion and PO details are received via an automated mail.
• If higher authority declines the request, an e-mail is sent to the respective user to modify the PO & send it again for approval.

There is no need for a maker and checker model as a more efficient and effective logic is pre-defined as per business requirements.

Reconciliation flow chart

Reconciliation:

• User login into Sheetkraft web UI, select the date range and click on the start button to run the process.
• Data is received in a common shared folder from various vendors. Sheetkraft fetches the data from a common shared folder.
• After a successful run, an auto-email is triggered to the relevant stakeholders in which summary report and pivots data is attached.

Impact:

As the file generated manually by downloading files from various systems and performing checks and calculations had multiple errors and were time-consuming (7-8 hours/day). After Automation by SheetKraft was introduced, there was no need for a maker and checker model which was previously used. The output is now generated automatically and sent via e-mail to all stakeholders. The entire process was cut down to merely 4-5 minutes/day.