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Tips   About the invoice process

An invoice is a request for payment, usually created by a supplier and sent to a customer.

If your company has suppliers who are not members of Ariba SN, they cannot load electronic invoices into Ariba Buyer and must send paper invoices instead. If your company has installed the invoice eForm, you can enter information from the paper invoice into Ariba Buyer to manually create an invoice.

When a supplier or a customer creates an invoice against a contract, Ariba Invoice automatically sends a copy of the invoice to Ariba SN after the invoice is fully approved. A supplier location must be specified on the invoice and the supplier must have a valid Ariba SN account and Ariba SN ID, or the invoice will not be copied to Ariba SN.

Related topics

About the invoice reconciliation process

About invoicing and receiving against contracts

About invoice eForm

About invoice reconciliation (IR) documents

Create an invoice

Create a new request

Create an invoice header

Invoice permissions

Invoice statuses

About the payment process

 

Invoicing involves these basic steps (see the process flow diagram for a detailed description of the process):

  1. Invoices are either loaded into Ariba Invoice from Ariba Supplier Network (Ariba SN), or manually created in Ariba Buyer (and then approved).
  2. The automatic reconciliation processor tries to match the invoice to existing purchase orders, contracts, and receipts, and then validates them according to your configuration.
  3. Ariba Invoice creates an Invoice Reconciliation (IR) document listing details from the invoice, purchase order, contract, and receipt.
  4. If no discrepancies are found or if the discrepancies are within your company's pre-configured tolerances, the IR document is sent directly to the Invoice Manager to approve.
  5. If unacceptable discrepancies are found, they are listed as exceptions on the IR document and must be manually reconciled.
  6. After the exceptions are reconciled and approved, Ariba Invoice approves the related payment request document and the payment process begins.

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