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Supplier Invoice Workflow (SINWOF)

Use this page to learn more about how to setup Supplier Invoice Workflow with respect to:

  1. Document Management
  2. Event Messages
  3. Security Checkpoints
  4. Software Requirements

Setup Document Management

Images can be attached to invoices in the Supplier Invoice Workflow by using functionality in Document Management.

There are two possible import scenarios, File Based and Message Based, that require some steps to setup. There are also some common configurations that must be in place for either of the two scenarios to work properly.

Basic Document Management Setup

  1. Make sure that Document Management, component DOCMAN, is installed. An appropriate Document Class must be created in Document Management, e.g. named as INVOICE.
  2. Enable Document Import on the invoicing side of the application.
    1. Select the Company / Invoice / Document Management sub tab.
    2. In the Document Class field, specify the Document Class to be used.

You can read more about different storages in Document Management here: Topics in IFS Cloud / Create and Maintain Document / Document File Repositories.

Supported Import Scenarios

Having performed this basic setup, next step will be to decide which one of the two Invoice Image import scenarios to be supported. The scenarios are referred to as File Based import and Message Based import of images.

File Based import is used as a result of scanning and interpreting paper invoices. The scanning process results in one (or several) files with invoice data and one image file for each scanned invoice. The data file must contain a reference to an image file for each invoice in the file. More information is found in Setup File Based Import section.

Message Based import can be performed when receiving supplier invoices through REST APIs or through a SOAP message. More information is found in the Setup Message Based Import section.

Setup File Based Import

Scanning of paper invoices results in files containing invoice data as well as one image file per each scanned invoice. To import these image files into the application you need to have them stored on a FTP.

Using a FTP Directory as Source Directory

  • Select the Use FTP option under Document Management section in the Company / Invoice / Supplier Invoice Workflow sub tab.
  • Specify the additional FTP parameters such as the server, port and directory that contains your source images. E.g. myFtpServer, 21 and mySourceDir for ftp://myFtpServer/mySourceDir
  • Pre configure the username and password to be used by the process.
  • It is necessary to specify the reference filename in the data file. Any directory name will be ignored and only the filename will be used. E.g. specifying the reference imagefile.ext or <any path>\sourcedir\imagefile.ext leads to the same, the program will expect to find the file ftp://myFtpServer/mySourceDir/imagefile.ext

Setup Message Based Import

This setup is used when supplier invoices is supposed to be received through REST APIs or SOAP messages. For these cases the invoices will be kept in the External Supplier Invoice interface prior to creation. These External Supplier Invoices must be connected to a Load Type, defined in External Supplier Invoice Parameters page.

If an invoice image is not included in the received invoice message it is possible to automatically attach an invoice document to this type of invoices by selecting the Create Image checkbox and activate the scheduled task Check in Invoice Report Document for your company.

Note: The document that will be created in this case is of course not the original invoice since it only exists in electronic form in the received invoice message. What happens is that a PDF-report in a default supplier invoice layout is created, checked in and attached to the invoice. The document is a suggested picture of what the original invoice might look like if it existed in paper format

Configure Event Messages

The Supplier Invoice Workflow component defines a number of events.

Event Description
Notify New Invoices A message is sent to authorizer(s), notifying that a new invoice is created
Notify Invoices Due A message sent to a dedicated user, notifying that there are unauthorized invoices approaching due date
Notify Authorizer Invoices Due A message sent to the authorizer of an unauthorized invoice, notifying that the invoice is due for payment within a specified number of days.
Notify Next Authorizer A message sent to the person that is next in turn to authorize his or her part of a posting proposal
Notify Wrong Authorizer State A message sent to a dedicated user, notifying that there are invoices with posting proposal lines where the status is set to Wrong Authorizer
Notify Waiting State A message intended to notify authorizers that there are invoices with posting proposal lines in Waiting state that are due for payment in a specified number of days
Notify Unbalanced Invoices A message is sent to authorizer(s) of unbalanced posting proposal. If the company uses consecutive authorization as the authorization routing method, the next authorizer will receive the notification. If the company uses parallel authorization as the authorization routing method, all the authorizers connected to the posting proposal will receive the notification.

To configure events, use Solution Manager.

  1. Navigate to Integration \ Events and open the Events page.
  2. Filter on Entity "NotificationEventsUtil" to quickly find the previously mentioned events.
  3. Select the event to be enabled/edited and press Show Action...
  4. One activity can have many actions. The actions presented are example actions defined during installation. Edit actions according to requirements or just leave them as they are. Note: At least one of event action must be Enabled to trigger the event.
  5. After this basic setup, it is also necessary to configure how these events are executed. As opposed to traditional events that are sent as soon as something occurs, these events are more like a to-do list that will be compiled on a regular basis (typically once every 24 hours). To schedule the event-processing, navigate to the My Administration \ Scheduled Tasks and choose New Database Task Schedule. Choose Database Task by using the List of Values and locate the task.

    Note: There is available one task per event. Schedule one task for each company that you want to monitor.

Handling Security Checkpoint

The concept of security checkpoints is introduced to ensure that critical flows and functions are completed intentionally and by the same user as originally logged into IFS Cloud.

The idea is to preventing "coffee break and computer left unlocked” type security problems and also gives the user a chance to think through and cancel invalid actions like e.g. wrong button click.

Supplier Invoice Workflow supports the Security Checkpoint concept to authenticate Authorizers and Acknowledgers when authorizing or acknowledging posting proposals. The triggered checkpoint that is used when doing authorization on an individual invoice is called SinwofInvoiceAuthorizing. When doing acknowledging on an individual invoice the triggered checkpoint is called SinwofInvoiceAcknowledging. For authorization or acknowledging on multiple invoices, if Multi Authorize checkbox is selected for the authorizer in Financials \ Supplier Invoice \ Invoice Workflow Basic Data \ Invoice Posting Authorizers , then use checkpoint SinwofMultiAuthorizing.

Please refer to Security Checkpoint Administration documentation. There is a global setting that enables or disables Security Checkpoints for IFS Cloud.

Also make sure that the checkpoint(s) SinwofInvoiceAuthorizing/SinwofInvoiceAcknowledging/SinwofMultiAuthorizing is marked as Active

  • Open Solution Manager \ Security \ Security Checkpoints \ Security Checkpoints
  • Select the row(s) with Checkpoint ID = SinwofInvoiceAuthorizing/SinwofInvoiceAcknowledging/SinwofMultiAuthorizing
  • Press command Activate or go to Details... and Activate

Software Requirements

To fully use the Supplier Invoice Workflow functionality, the following software requirements apply,

  • A prerequisite for automatic creation and document connection of supplier invoices is to have a software with scanning and interpretation capabilities. One example is the product is INVOICES from ReadSoft.
  • Viewing the result of scanned invoices requires a default image viewer for invoice image file format. Common file format for invoice images are pdf or tiff.
  • To view the default supplier invoice layout as described in Setup Message Based Import, it is required to have Acrobat Reader or another PDF aware browser installed.
  • The Send E-mail functionality is using the default MAPI messaging service on the client PC.