Application Profile
Purchasing (Procure-to-Pay) and Expense Report System 1
Customer
Example Application  
This application will enable your company to purchase goods and services, and manage expense reports.  The solution composes of the procure-to-pay process from the internal creation of the purchase requisition, to delivering the purchase orders to the supplier, to finally, handling the accounts payable process through invoice validation and payment approval.  

The application can be accessed via the Internet, which allows your company to conduct business with suppliers without any security issues or IT investment.

The process starts with the submission of a purchase requisition to purchase a good or a service (laptops, software, consultants, and professional services).  The user begins by logging in to the QuickBase application via the World Wide Web.  Based on the user profile settings, the user will only see a section of the application that allows them to enter purchase requisitions, expense reports and check requests, and view approved suppliers the company conducts business with.  Everything is in the QuickBase application, in other words, it is a “one stop shop”.

All the fields in the requisition form are customizable based on your needs.  There can also be fields that are dynamically updated.  For example, when selecting a supplier, a drop down list will be provided with the approved suppliers which are populated based on another table.  You only want your purchasing personnel to maintain that list but you want your users to have access to it during the requisition creation process.  The solution can also provide standard, i.e. catalog items, to be purchased.  Once a standard item is selected, the price of the item defaults automatically.  The user then enters the quantity which causes the total price to be calculated dynamically.  

The solution provides the ability for the user to request a new supplier be added to the approved suppliers.  The new supplier request is forwarded to the Procurement personnel to determine whether to add the supplier to the approved supplier list or not.  Once the supplier is added, then it becomes available for the users to select.  

When the user submits the requisition, QuickBase routes the requisition to appropriate approvers based on the business needs.  If the business needs a finance approval other than the management approval, based on the total amount of the requisition it will be routed to a Finance personnel.  There is also workflow flexibility based on the purchasing category (IT Hardware, Facilities, Marketing etc.) selected; customized rules can be set up easily.  For example, for IT categories a company might want an IT standards personnel review the request.  These kinds of business rules can be embedded very easily without the customization that other solutions in the market place require.  You can have an office manager set these up vs. a very costly IT engineer.

Once the purchase requisition is approved, the Procurement buyer is notified via email.  The buyer can create the PO and attach it to the same record. The end user is then notified via email that the PO has been created.  

Once the supplier delivers the goods or services, the supplier can send the invoice electronically to the Accounts Payable.  Accounts Payable can receive, scan, and apply the invoice electronically to the PO.  This would trigger an email to the end user for their approval.  Once the end user reviews the electronic copy of the invoice and approves it for payment, the supplier is ready to be paid based on the approved payment terms in the system.  This would close the procure-to-pay cycle.

The solution, end to end, is automated via the QuickBase.  All the steps of the process are conducted in QuickBase.  By providing a single system to conduct and manage purchasing activities, the process is easier to manage and provides strong financial integrity.  It enables your business to have an efficient and effective purchasing system that is inexpensive, quick to implement, and easy to use and maintain.  Within a matter of days, the automated procurement system can be up and running.

In future releases, the solution can be improved to include a “supplier internet portal” in which suppliers can login and maintain their records, view their respective purchase orders and handle billing online.  Given that QuickBase is a web application, this eliminates complex firewall issues and excessive engineering resources for integration. Another improvement that can be added to the QuickBase is the negotiation and contract signing portion.  This would allow your company to electronically sign agreements with suppliers and then execute purchase orders against these suppliers.
Install from library
Free
Finance
Supply Chain
Manufacturing
General
Purchasing Procurement Requisition Purchase Order Check Request Approval Compliance Expense Reports Budget
272
Reviews
0
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When you bring additional fields into a conversion, Quickbase often finds inconsistencies. For example, say you're converting your Companies column into its own table. One company, Acme Corporation, has offices in New York, Dallas and Portland. So, when you add the City column to the conversion, Quickbase finds three different locations for Acme. A single value in the column you're converting can only match one value in any additional field. Quickbase needs you to clean up the extra cities before it can create your new table. To do so, you have one of two choices:

  • If you want to create three separate Acme records (Acme-New York, Acme-Dallas and Acme-Portland) click the Conform link at the top of the column.
  • If the dissimilar entries are mistakes (say Acme only has one office in New York and the other locations are data-entry errors) go back into your table and correct the inconsistencies—in this case, changing all locations to New York. Then try the conversion again.

Read more about converting a column into a table.