Processing Invoice in SAP using Invoice Management and Open Text
Open Text’s SAP Invoice Management Solution helps business to process vendor invoices more efficiently and quickly. This solution was developed with best practice process from various industry segments which uses SAP BAPI/Workflow concepts to automatically process vendor invoices in SAP. The invoices with discrepancies can be automatically routed to concerned Accounts Payable team member and eliminate delays in decision making and manual intervention.
Following are the technical steps required to process an invoice through SAP VIM(Vendor Invoice Management)
- Use transaction code OAWD to archive an incoming vendor invoice(PDF). You can Drag & Drop the PDF copy into SAP. If you receive a hard copy invoice from vendor, you have an option to scan the invoice using Enterprise Scanner also. This step creates Work Item and associated DP (Document Processing) number.
- Use transaction code /n/OPT/VIM_7AX8 to view the status of DP document. The initial status of the DP document will be (01) SCANNED. The ICC (Invoice Capture Centre) extraction link polls for documents from SAP. If the service is configured correctly, the document status changes to (72) SENT TO OCR.
- You can watch the extraction activities if you start the ICC Customizing Client and open the Jobs view on the General tab. Once the extraction is completed on ICC, the status of DP document in SAP is changed to (73) EXTRACTION COMPLETED
- The DP trigger Job changes the status of DP document to (74) READY FOR VALIDATION.
- The ICC Validation Client, or the Customizing Client, respectively, polls for all documents from SAP with status 74. Subsequently, the status changes to (75) SEND FOR VALIDATION. The accounts payable validation team can access the invoice image on ICC Validation Client. Once the validation team submits the DP document on ICC, the status of DP document changes to (76) VALIDATION COMPLETE.
- The DP trigger job moves the DP document to VIM Workflow. The DP document is moved away from ICC admin tool transaction. If all the fields are extracted correctly and business rules are validated invoice is posted in SAP. If the DP document does not pass the configured business rules, system routes the workflow item to concerned AP team. VIM Workflow should be configured to trigger the DP to respective team in case of business rule validation failures.
Overall Process Flow
Pre-requisites:
- DP Trigger job has to be scheduled in SAP (Program –> /OPT/VIM_DP_TRIGGER).
- The Extraction Links should be running on ICC.
- The DokuStar Services should be running on ICC Server
- Content Server should be configured to archive the invoice images.
Good overview about VIM processing
Hello Prasanth,
I also think that this is a good overview and we follow the same process. But I have a question, if the status is “75” Send to Valudation but invoice still not appearing in Validation Client, what do I need to do ? If there are documents with wrong statuses stuck in queue, how do we clear them from validation?
Cheers,
Shuja
Hi Shuja,
If the status is 'Sent for Validation' for an invoice, either the DP should be visible on ICC validation client or there should be an error on ICC validation client specific to this invoice. In the error case, the DP will be set to 'Validation Rejected' status. If you have any error in validation the client, I would suggest to do the following:
Normally, you get validation error messages If there are any issues in extraction or If there are any issues in archiving.
Hope it helps.
Thanks,
Prasanth