Zahara's key strength is the ability to create simple or incredibly sophisticated approval workflows in minutes. We have a range of conditions and rules that can be applied to each step of the Accounts Payable Automation process, to engage the right people in your organisation.
Approval workflows can be created for purchase orders (requests to buy that can be turned into purchase orders) and invoice approvals. The workflows can engage users for an approve / reject outcome but also to include steps such as sending a PO to a supplier or exporting an invoice into a finance system.
As an organisation increases in size, there is a need to add more control on company spend. Making sure your buyers are buying from the right suppliers at the right price. You can achieve this easily when you introduce purchase requisition workflows. Managers can easily approve or reject spend requests and business leaders can have a complete visibility of all spend not yet showing on the Purchase Ledger.
When Approval workflows are used for purchase requests, Accounts Payable Automation can be facilitated more easily. When fully-embraced and purchase orders are used, the validation or authorisation is front-end loaded. This means purchases are approved and coded accurately before the delivers. When their invoice arrives, it can be expedited through to your finance system for a payment run.
The buyer creates a purchase request. This can be attached to a multi-step purcase order workflow. The outcome from this could be purchase approval in which case a purchase order could be sent to the supplier. You have a choice of using the original requisition number or a new second sequential number purely for the Purchase Order.
Invoice Approval workflows can involve more than one approver. This is what we mean by multi-ste - basically a multi person approval. Perhaps a department head approves and then a general manager and then a director. But perhaps we only involve these additional people under certain conditions - like the price being above a price. This should be the key consideration of any invoice approval software.
We support group approvals where one person from a group can approve invoices with a few options on how we select the right person. We can also facilitate different line-items being sent to different invoice approvers as part of the same invoice approval workflow