Management is one of the essential factors that decides the efficiency and productiveness of a business. In SAP, Invoice Management by OpenText (VIM) is a comprehensive measure that automates and manages the flow of invoices of vendors. Large enterprises and corporations use this system to facilitate easy partnerships with stakeholders in the Procure to Pay or P2P process.
VIM comes integrated with the SAP ERP system. SAP teams and vendors faced several drawbacks while managing the process of invoices. Vendor Invoice Management is an automated system that overcame all these drawbacks and enabled a fast processing process. This article will discuss how VIM works in SAP, how to implement this, and how it facilitates businesses.
What is Vendor Invoice Management (VIM)?
Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) is an OpenText product dedicated to large companies and shared service centers in corporate groups. It facilitates them by automating the process of obtaining, validating, routing, organizing, and monitoring vendor invoices, where the counts of financial documents processed attain tens of thousands per month.
It provides businesses with opportunities wishing to install a more efficient and fast invoice management process to guarantee precision and minimize manual errors. It integrates all the first-class SAP tools and solutions from OpenText to provide a comprehensive and transparent flow of invoices, from documenting to posting to archiving.
Process of posting invoices with VIM
- Internal Prerequisite
- Purchase Entreaty
- Requesting for Quotation
- Purchase Order creation
- MIGO, which determines the Goods receipt number (GRN)
- MIRO refers to an Invoice created or posted
Advantages of using Vendor Invoice Management for your business
Simplify Processes: Deliver Faster Returns
Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) by OpenText, provided by SAP, is a proactive measure for handling invoices and provides a comprehensive flow of invoices. It is a robust tool that businesses need to process invoices. Every company receives invoices, pays them on time, and follows legal and tax requirements, which becomes much easier with SAP VIM, which ensures the business's success.
Invoices are a crucial aspect for businesses. If the management team does not process these promptly or enter invoices correctly, it can create significant complications affecting the overall firm. For instance, it may affect cash flow, disappointing customers and suppliers and causing process delays.
A proactive, out-of-the-box solution is the key is what VIM caters to, which improves and maintains outstanding vendor relations, which overcomes this. VIM facilitates the infrastructure, streamlines the finance strategies across departments, and ensures business have paid their customers on time.
Have the Control Over All the Necessary Business Information
Gradually business processes are driving steadily toward automated approaches. VIM allows businesses to enhance efficiency and facilitate document-centric processes. Businesses using the VIM with SAP ERP system can own out-and-out control of their valuable information. One significant advantage of VIM is it utilizes Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to support the automation process of SAP-related documents wisely.
Common problems in the Invoice Management Process that VIM easily manages
While managing the process of invoicing, the management team encounters these problems, which they can overcome using SAP VIM:
- The management team includes multiple individuals for managing the process of vendor invoices, which often creates chaos. It involves distributing the invoices and associated information several times.
- The process involves multiple stakeholders, which illustrates numerous copies of an invoice can exist. It can cause a lack of clarity and different versions of the truth.
- The cycle time to process the invoice can be lengthy and includes several manual steps, which can cause significant loss of early payment discounts.
- Often management team finds difficulties in reducing or preventing duplicate payments, postings, and even missing invoices.
But the SAP VIM can solve all the above problems and these are as follows:
- VIM automates paper-to-post invoices. It reduces the manual errors involved in invoice processing and increases the chances of successfully receiving, monitoring and routing the vendor invoices.
- It automatically extracts invoice information and checks the validation applied to the invoice sent through email or in the post. It eliminates the use of workflow and approvals triggering to enable invoice posting.
SAP VIM Architecture
How VIM works?
Following are the steps that illustrate the working of Vendor Invoice Management to manage the invoice of businesses and customers:
- One sent invoices through email, paper, or by fax.
- The first process is the scanning process that the VIM does. It comprehensively scans the invoice.
- Then, the invoice enters the archive server, where the VIM automatically archives the invoice to the document and then stores and identifies the record by a distinctive 30-digit alphanumeric number.
- The management team then sends the document to SAP VIM, then VIM stores and identifies the document by a 12-digit hexadecimal number, called the DP number.
- SAP VIM sends the generated document to the ICC (Invoice capturing center) server for data extraction on the invoice. Once after extracting the complete data, such as currency, vendor number, date of posting, vendor address, etc., from that record, it dispatches the information back to SAP VIM.
- If the VIM finds any mismatched data, there will be validation of extracted data that happens in exception handling. For instance, cases where there is mismatching data or illicit data for a particular domain, etc.
- When the process does not find exceptions, it posts the invoice via MIRO and BAPI.
- It is the process of Early archiving, where the SAP VIM process the first invoice, scans the invoice, and stores it in archiving server. Lastly, it generates the DP number. VIM applies an early archiving process.
Conclusion
Businesses can achieve a higher level of efficiency in managing the invoices of vendors with the integrated solution of SAP ERP, i.e., SAP VIM. Every business should stick to Vendor Invoice Management standard processes as much as possible to automate, simplifies, and optimizes the process of obtaining, validating, routing, organizing, and monitoring vendor invoices. The SAP VIM can also facilitate efficient collaboration with stakeholders in the Procure to Pay or P2P process.