In Zahara, you can record two types of invoices – standalone and those that relate to a purchase order. There are several different ways of recording an invoice in Zahara and there are two external applications you can use to scan/load invoices – SmartInvoice & ABBYY FlexiCapture, as well as the inbuilt Invoice Inbox. Once an invoice is recorded, it can be routed for approval either automatically in a rules based system or in Ad Hoc, where you choose the approver. Ultimately, Zahara is designed to export the invoice into your accounts system and there are many options to choose from fully integrated to just a CSV or Excel spreadsheet.
Invoices should flow into your accounts system very quickly. Users can approve by email and can be reminded daily to do their approvals so there is no reason for big delays as Zahara is a paperless process. However, there will be a point at month-end where you will have invoices in Zahara that haven’t been exported into accounts. There are a number of ways to report on this. Our reporting section has an Order/Invoice difference report. You can also create invoice reports with the export date, showing those invoices not yet exported. Zahara users work in different ways so there should be something for everyone in Zahara. Ultimately you can use the invoices list view to filter down any invoices that have not yet been exported or approved.
The invoice list view is available from the documents menu – Invoices (Z3)
The first filter to work with is the time period you wish to display. This will be remembered provided you don’t choose all. You can also set this to show different types of invoices. You can search inside the results by using the search bar just above the list view. You can sort the columns and as stated above choose the fields you wish to display. Clicking the approval icon will show you the approval process. Ultimately you want to see green for approved, green for 100% match with order and green for exported.
One of the really nice features of Zahara is that you can record an order and then record multiple invoices against it. For example, it could be a master PO and you expect 12 invoices over the next year. You can record those invoices and always see the order invoice balance. It’s entirely down to you how you create the master PO – whether it’s 12 separate lines or one master line. If you have watched the video above you will see that keeping the line items in place is very important.
If you are a Xero user and you also want to use Dext, Auto Entry or Dochub, you can import your invoices placed in Draft in Xero. Enable the feature in Business > Settings > Integrations and an import icon will appear in your invoices list view page. Read the dedicated article on this to find out more.
First off choose the type of entity you wish to search for. ie choose invoice. Then key in an invoice number. Then click search or hit enter. If you choose ‘All’ as the category, you can search inside the line item content as well. This is the fastest way to find an invoice.
When an invoice is sent for approval, you can specify – both for Adhoc approvals and rules-based – whether the Approver can or must edit the coding. This can be useful if you receive an invoice and you don’t know how to code it. In this instance, the user cannot simply approve or reject, they have to adjust the coding on the item you specified – ie Project / Job code.