Getting accounts payable and purchasing in sync.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Payment processing

Tehseen Ali, President and CEO of Verian Technologies, offers the following tips for improving the linkage between purchasing and accounts payables (AP) departments:

* Implement a "no PO, no pay" policy. Insisting on purchase orders (POs) may not be immediately practical in every organization, but those that have adopted it have been able to reap tremendous benefits in AP and in purchasing.

* Never let purchase order issuers access your invoice processing screens. Never means absolutely, unequivocally never. The risk of doing so, of course, is that someone in purchasing could approve an invoice and/or initiate payment for a purchase that he or she originated and received.

* Purchasing managers must accept responsibility for purchase orders being correct and complete. A strong purchase-to-pay process demands a strong culture of accountability. Because most invoice errors can be traced back to incorrect or missing data on the purchase order, the purchasing manager must be held accountable by his or her supervisor and AP for purchase order data being correct.

* AP should not deal with pricing or receiving discrepancy resolution. It should be policy that the requisitioner, PO issuer and the person who receives items should be responsible for sorting out invoice discrepancies--AP should not be responsible for tracking down the facts.

* AP should collect all questions for purchasing in a file handed over at day's end. This idea works best in a centralized environment, but can modified for a decentralized organization as well, using...