Invoice Reconciliation

My tasks include resolving issues with invoice reconciliations. In SAP Ariba, invoices are matched against a PO or a contract and the goods receipt. My job is to make sure that invoice issues that couldn’t be reconciled automatically are addressed. For this, I use the full SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing user interface.​

Once the invoice has been fully reconciled, the system will issue a payment request to the ERP which will then be used to pay the supplier.

Invoice documents represent a supplier’s request for payment for goods or services.​

​Once the invoice document is sent to the SAP Ariba invoicing solution, the document is kept as is and cannot be modified. This preserves the original invoice for audit purposes.​​

The invoice reconciliation or IR is a copy of the original invoice that is used to reconcile any discrepancies or exceptions that occur on the invoice.​

And any changes to the invoice are tracked using the IR document.

SAP Ariba invoicing matches all incoming invoices against any corresponding POs, contracts, receipts, or any other documents to validate the data.​

If there are any discrepancies in the data based on pre-configured settings, the system generates an invoice exception to flag the discrepancy.​

Invoice exceptions have tolerances that can be set to specify the thresholds at which the exception is triggered.​

Invoice exceptions also have settings to determine who is added to the invoice reconciliation to handle the triggered exceptions.​

These tolerances and exception handler settings can be adjusted at any time to make changes to the process.

Simply put, an invoice reconciliation document is approved to signal to the supplier willingness to pay the reconciled invoice.​

​Alternatively, the invoice reconciliation document can be rejected, signaling the invoice has been denied and will not be paid.

Once an invoice reconciliation document has been fully reconciled and approved, it generates a payment request which is sent to the ERP system.​

​The payment request communicates to the ERP the reconciled amounts to pay the supplier, and the ERP submits the payment.​

Once the payment is made, the remittance data can be imported back into SAP Ariba Procurement to provide visibility and status updates.