How to Settle an Invoice

A payment invoice is an accounts payable record related to a buy-side shipment. For example, payment invoices are issued by carriers or service providers and are paid by logistics providers.

Note: Settling an invoice means preparing it for payment. The actual issuing and mailing of checks or other payment means is done by your accounts payable system.

The settlement process consists of these basic steps:

• Matching invoices to their shipments.
• Approving invoices for payment and issuing their payment vouchers.
• Allocating the transportation costs of invoices.

The procedures for settling a single invoice or a batch of invoices differ. For convenience, many of the settlement functions can be automated.

Note: Before an invoice can be settled, it must first have been entered or integrated into the system.

Note: In addition, the buy shipment to which the invoice is related must have a Secure Resources status of ACCEPTED, BOOKED, or PICKUP.

Manually Settle a Single Invoice

1. In Financials > Payment Invoice Manager, conduct a search query for the invoice.
2. On the Invoices Results page(s), select the invoice that you want to process.
   
   If you want to prevent the invoice from being processed, select Reject Invoice.
3. From the drop-down list at the top right of the page, select an action to match the invoice to a shipment:
   • To match the invoice to a known shipment, select and complete Match Invoice.
   • To find possible matching shipments, select and complete Find Valid Matches.
   • To automatically match the invoice to a shipment, based on the match rules that have been assigned to service providers, select and complete AutoMatch Invoices.
4. Once the invoice is matched to a shipment, select and complete Approve Invoice.
   
   When an invoice is approved, a voucher for it is created.
5. Issue a voucher for the invoice using the Send Voucher Interface action.
   
   When an invoice is approved, a voucher is automatically created for it. But the voucher needs to be issued to a specified directory so that its payment data can be accessed and used by an accounts payable system.
6. To allocate the shipping costs of the invoice, return to the Invoices Results page, and select and complete Allocate Issued Vouchers.
7. To add or subtract charges from this invoice, select and complete Approve Invoice.
   
   When you adjust the payment, an additional payment voucher is created for the invoice.

Automatically Settle a Batch of Invoices

1. In Financials > Payment Rule Manager, set up match rules and match rule profiles, and then assign the profiles to service providers.
2. In the Payment Rule Manager, set up auto approve rules and auto approve rule profiles, and then assign the profiles to service providers.
3. In the Allocation Rule Manager set up allocation rules and allocation rule profiles, and then assign the profiles to service providers.
4. To include auto-pay invoices in this batch, in Financials > Process Manager select and complete Generate All Auto Pay Invoices.
   
   Service providers must be selected for auto-payment before auto-pay invoices can be generated.
5. In Financials > Process Manager, select and complete Process All Invoices.
6. In the Process Manager, select and complete Bulk Allocation.
7. In the Process Manager, select and complete Issue Allocation.