What a supplier login shows, and what must be true first — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This presentation is for you if you run accounts payable at GadgetSphere and you are thinking of letting a supplier see how their invoices matched your receipts. In about nine minutes you will know what a supplier login shows, what has to be working on your side before anyone signs in, and which jobs stay with your team.

Step 1 — Know what your supplier will see

After this step you will know what a login gives a supplier, and what it does not. One of GadgetSphere Distribution’s accessory wholesalers sends about forty e-invoices a month, and every month a handful do not line up with your goods received notes. The AP Automation Supplier Access applet lets that wholesaler see the same rows your team works: the e-invoices your group setup assigns to them, and whether each matched your receipts by document and by value. They can type a Supplier Remark and set an Action Deadline on a row, and nothing else. The applet creates no document and changes nothing in your ledger, your stock or what you owe them. Access comes from a Consolidated Arap group on the Supplier applet, not from the Supplier Login tab your order and receipt portals use.

Reference: AP Automation Supplier Access Applet — Overview

Step 2 — Get the matching running before anyone signs in

After this step you will know why a new login can open onto an empty screen. Every row the supplier sees was written by your side’s matching jobs, and nothing schedules those jobs by default: the four processors behind AP Automation run only from a scheduler entry or when support triggers them. Until they run, the supplier signs in to nothing, and the cause is not their login. So the first request goes to your BigLedger contact, to schedule the four jobs, and it goes before any invitation. Then look at your own E-invoice Summary in the AP Automation applet. The supplier’s screen reads the same rows as yours, narrowed to their group, so if the wholesaler’s invoices are not on your screen, they will not be on theirs.

Reference: AP Automation Applet — What this applet will not do today

Step 3 — Make your receipts matchable first

After this step the rows your supplier sees will say matched where the goods really were received. The matcher compares the delivery-order number on their e-invoice with the number your receiving clerk keyed in the goods received note’s Client Doc 3 field, not the External Delivery Order box, and it compares amounts with no tolerance. Client Doc 3 stays read-only on the receipt screen until an administrator turns on the setting that makes it editable, so that comes first. A receipt keyed without the number can never match, and a supplier name that differs from your record needs an alias from support. So a login given too early shows the supplier a screen of unmatched rows, many of them your doing. One more limit to tell them about: an invoice that reached you over Peppol appears on these screens, but only invoices read from a PDF are matched, so a Peppol invoice will never show as matched here.

Reference: AP Automation Applet — Before you can use it

Step 4 — Give every field on the row an owner

After this step each field on a row will have one owner. The supplier owns two: a Supplier Remark explaining an unmatched or under-valued row, and an Action Deadline, the date by which they will act on it. Your screens show both read-only, so the deadline is their commitment, not a date your team sets. Your finance team owns Finance Remarks and Payment Status. The supplier reads both and cannot change either on their screens, so write every finance remark as a sentence you are content for the supplier to read. And Payment Status is only a label your team sets by hand: nothing reads it from, or writes it to, what you actually owe the supplier.

Reference: AP Automation Supplier Access Applet — Fields

Step 5 — Keep the jobs the login does not do

After this step you will know which work stays with people. A supplier’s Save e-mails nobody: your team sees the remark only when they next load the summary, so name the person who looks, and how often. A remark posts nothing and corrects nothing; whatever is wrong is still put right on the document itself, by whoever issued it. There is a report job that e-mails each group’s logins a spreadsheet of their rows, but its message is fixed text that sends suppliers to a sign-in address that is not your company’s. Do not have it run until support confirms what your suppliers will receive. Tell each supplier yourself where to sign in, what you expect them to write, and who on your side reads it.

Reference: AP Automation Supplier Access Applet — Lifecycle and effects

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Build the group that decides what a login sees · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation