Best Practice for processing Capital PO's

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Bev Edwards
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Currently, our buyer for Capital PO's is being directed to place $1.00 in the Unit Cost field and place the actual Unit Cost dollar amount in the Quanitity field on the PO20 form.

This was explained to me that this allows the managers of the particular capital budget for a project to be able to approve (match and pay) the invoice. It is designed to give the managers the control they seek over what gets paid against their capital budget balance.

I also heard that Hopkins handles their capital po's this way in Lawson. (Our department calls it the flip flop method,)
David Williams
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I would not say that is Best Practice - it requires receivers to be keyed in order for a 3 way match to occur. Are you using an approval process for invoices (like ProcessFlow)?
David Williams
Michelle Wetzel
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I have to agree with David. We considered it with our go live 5 years ago, especially for those POs where you don't actually know how much each invoice is going to be.

However, we use Service - Amount in those cases when it overlaps with a capital PO and keep it clean for reporting. We are able to report that we spent X with a company without having to do a side calculation to bring in the actual spend which is over in quantity.

Our process flow for approvals is pretty tight - for capital orders, it goes all the way up to the vice president if they us the capital account, regardless of the dollar value. This means the project lead is also seeing every order before they in turn approve it to go up the line. GL assigned accounts for us in the general ledger that we use as programming points: if someone orders using account 123 - process flow picks it up and sends it up one flow. If they use 456, it goes to a different one.
Bev Edwards
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I wouldn't call it best practice either. My director and Purchasing manager wanted to know if there was a better way (best practice) to handle the Capitol PO process since the way they are doing it now seems to be causing some reporting issues.

I'm not familiar with Process Flow, at least not setting it up anyway. I've seen it and used to run a Process Flow for another process in another department, but that was established by by someone else, pehaps a consultant.

I'm not sure how the process flow that was mentioned by Michelle would be executed.
David Williams
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Bev - I mentioned ProcessFlow (for Invoice Approvals) as a way for managers to review the invoice before it is applied to their budgets. You can still do it the old fashioned way and have them approved prior to keying in AP.
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Kat V
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We are keying in the Capitals with actual quantity and cost. There is a PO number range and code associated with the capitals and the activities tracking is turned on. This forces the invoices to route for approval prior to payment.
Julie
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We use a po code of "CAP" and have activities tracking turned on.
Bill Ianni
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Anytime I see $1 in the unit cost field, I cringe. It is anything BUT best practice!