You can watch one of our two videos about invoice verification. The second one is from our latest product-updates webinar.
Why enable the ‘Verify’ step in the Invoices Workflow?
The 'Verify' step is helpful when you want to assign specific employees to verify invoices individually because:
Suppliers send invoices directly to the finance team and not to the recipients of their services/goods.
The recipient of the supplier's services/goods is not always the manager of the related cost centre.
Expenses get pre-approved as purchase requests but you still want to check that the delivered items match what was ordered and invoiced.
How does the Verify step differ from Review and Approve?
There are 3 steps in the invoice verification process:
Review step
The ‘Review’ step is where the compliance review of an invoice is carried out: Does the submitted invoice include all the information required for it to comply with laws and company policy?
Note:
Only admins or accountants can review an invoice.
Every invoice must go through the ‘Review’ step, it cannot be skipped.
Verify step
The ‘Verify’ step is where the factual verification of an invoice is carried out. The recipient of the service or goods is asked to check if the invoice matches what was ordered and delivered.
Note:
The verifier of any given invoice is manually selected by the admin or accountant in the ‘Review’ step
The verifier can also be asked to indicate which cost centre / departmental budget the invoice payment should be deducted from - which can determine who is asked to do the ‘Approve’ step.
The ‘Verify’ step can be enabled or disabled completely in your Invoice Workflow Settings.
Even with the ‘Verify’ step enabled an invoice can skip the ‘Verify’ step by leaving the Verifier field blank during the ‘Review’ step.
Approve step
The ‘Approve’ step is where the budgetary approval of an invoice is carried out: the responsible person(s) confirm the invoice is a legitimate business expense that they pre-approved and have budgeted for.
Note:
Who should approve any given invoice is determined by your Approval Policies.
Your Approval Policies can dictate that the ‘Approve’ step should be skipped for invoices that meet certain criteria, e.g. they are under a certain amount.
The ‘Approve’ step is skipped if the Invoice matches the Purchase Request it is linked to.
Disabling the Approve step
Admins can set an approval policy to exempt invoices below a certain threshold from approval. By setting this threshold to a high amount, all invoices can effectively skip the ‘Approve’ step. However, complete disabling of the 'Approve' step is not currently supported in the application.
How does the invoice verification feature work?
How can the verifier be selected for each invoice?
The person(s) who should carry out the factual verification of the invoice is inputted in the 'Verifier' field by the person carrying out the 'Review' step.
If you’re not sure which of several potential verifiers to choose you can select multiple users in the verifier field. This sends a verification request to all users. Verification is only required from 1 user - whoever verifies first.
If the Verifier field is left blank, no one is asked to verify the invoice and the invoice skips the ‘Verify’ step.
Can the verifier be automatically selected based on who the supplier is?
Yes. Each supplier can be given a default verifier. When an invoice is in review, the verifier field will be pre-populated with the user selected as the default verifier for the supplier. Whenever you enter a verifier for an invoice from a supplier that does not yet have a default verifier, you will be given the option to set the entered verifier as the default for that supplier. You can also navigate to Settings > Accounting > Suppliers, select a supplier, and under "accounting," set their default fields.
Can the verifier be automatically selected based on who submitted the purchase request the invoice is linked to?
Yes. When an invoice is linked to a purchase request, the verifier field is pre-populated with the user who submitted the linked purchase request. If the verifier field was already populated before the invoice was linked to the purchase request, the value in the verifier field will remain the same.
What if the person who submitted the invoice is the person who needs to verify it?
If the submitter verified the invoice before they submitted outside of the Moss platform you can simply leave the verifier field blank to skip the verification step for this invoice.
Can the verifier be automatically selected based on who submitted the purchase request the invoice is linked to?
Yes. When an invoice is linked to a purchase request, the verifier field is pre-populated with the user who submitted the linked purchase request. If the verifier field was already populated before the invoice was linked to the purchase request, the value in the verifier field will remain the same.
Can we skip the verification step for certain invoices?
Yes, just leave the 'Verifier' field blank.
How does the verifier find out they need to verify an invoice?
Once a verifier is selected and the invoice passes the review step the selected verifier(s) receive an email when an invoice has passed ‘Review’ and is pending their verification. If the invoice is still pending verification after the first day, then the request is included in the daily digest email Moss sends to employees who have pending tasks.
How can the verifier view the invoice they’ve been asked to verify?
Verifiers can open the invoice directly from a link in the email notification sent to them or by navigating to the Invoices > Verify or My Moss > To Approve screens.
How can the verifier confirm the invoice is correct?
If the verifier is happy the invoice is correct they simply hit the “confirm” button. If they do, the invoice leaves the ‘Verify’ step and moves forward in your workflow.
What happens if the verifier notices the items on the invoice do not match what was ordered or delivered?
Verifiers can ‘challenge’ an invoice, this gives them the option to ‘send back to review’ with a comment. The Invoice will be sent back to ‘Review’ in the ‘Needs Review’ state and the comment will be marked with a ‘change requested’ label. From this point, you can liaise with the supplier about the discrepancy.
Can the verifier allocate the invoice to the correct cost centre, team, budget or purchase request?
Yes. If enabled in your Invoice Workflow Settings, verifiers can input the relevant cost centre, team, budget, purchase request and other accounting fields. Note that admins and accountants can still modify these details after the verification step if you wish to allow this.
The accounting information inputted by the verifier will be used to help determine who should carry out the budgetary approval according to your invoice approval policy.
What happens if the invoice was sent to the wrong person?
If the invoice is sent to the wrong person it needs to first go back to the ‘Review’ step so a different Verifier can be selected before being resent to the correct person.
Verifiers, Admins and Accountants can all send an Invoice back to the ‘Review’ step when it’s in the ‘Verify’ step.
Verifiers should ‘challenge’ the invoice, this gives them the option to ‘send back to review’ with a comment. Doing so moves the Invoice back to ‘Review’ in the ‘Needs Review’ state and logs the comment with a ‘change requested’ label.
Admins and Accountants will see a ‘Send Back to Review’ button on each Invoice.
If an invoice has already passed the ‘Verify’ step and is in the ‘Approve’ or ‘Export’ step, it can still be sent back for review. When that is the case and any of the previously selected verifiers needs to verify the same invoice again, then the ‘Verify’ step will be skipped, as the invoice has already been verified. If a different Verifier is selected then the invoice will go through the ‘Verify’ step again. Since we can have multiple verifiers: if any of the verifiers verified the invoice previously then the verify step is skipped. If none of the verifiers verified the invoice previously, then it will enter the verify step again.
What happens if the person the invoice was sent to is absent?
If the verifier is absent, they have a substitute set and approval delegation is turned on for them, then their substitute also gets the verification request and can verify the invoice on their behalf. Admins and accountants can see if the verifier is absent and who the invoice has been delegated to in the verifier section of the details drawer.
How can we identify which invoices are still pending verification?
The ‘Verify’ tab in the invoice module lists and counts all invoices pending verification. In the ‘All’ tab, the invoice status is shown and a status filter can be applied to show only invoices ‘pending verification’.
The verification status is included in the invoice tables, details drawers and the CSV exports.
When an invoice has been verified it will no longer appear in the ‘Verify’ tab. Instead, it will be found in the subsequent step of the workflow spending on its status (approve, export, payments) or the ‘All’ section of the invoice module.
How can we identify who has been asked to verify an invoice?
The verifiers of an invoice are visible in the ‘Verifier’ column of the invoice table, in the invoice details drawer and in CSV exports. When an invoice is verified, the name of the person who verified it is visible in the verifier column of the invoices table and in the activity log in the invoice details.
How can Moss help me unblock invoices that are pending verification?
The ‘Verifier column’ in the ‘Verify’ table displays the verifier(s) of each invoice. This helps you to know who to chase.
The ‘Delivery Date’ column in the ‘Verify’ table helps to know if verifiers should already be in a position to verify the invoice against what was actually delivered.
The ‘Invoice Due Date’ column indicates which invoices are more urgent to get verified.
Invoices that are overdue and due within 7 days are filterable from the summary component above the table.
If the verifier is absent, the request for verification can be automatically delegated to their substitute or you can manually resend the invoice to someone else to verify.
If an invoice is matched to a purchase request will the ‘Verify’ step be automatically skipped?
No. The purpose of the ‘Verify’ step is to confirm the items you are being billed for on the invoice match what was delivered. Even if the purchase request was pre-approved it’s still important to confirm the supplier actually delivered what was ordered and you are being billed for.
The purpose of the ‘Approve’ step is to confirm the invoice is an appropriate and legitimate business expense and has been budgeted for. The ‘Approve’ step will be skipped if the invoice is matched to a purchase request.
It is possible to manually skip the ‘Verify’ step by leaving the ‘Verifier’ field blank.