Manage Vendor Bill Approval Process
Before I just started creating a workflow on my end I figured I would check to see if anyone has run against this.... We are having a challenge with routing vendor bills that come in to get approved by project managers (on construction projects). In the past our accounting team has paid a bill before work was completed, creating an issue for us.
Any recommendations on best way to do this? Scanning, saving, and filling out a request form is going to be way too time consuming for the amount of bills we get.
I was thinking maybe we can just email the bill to wrike and to the project administrator and somehow it creates a task automatically? Not sure if it can do that?
Or any other recommendations on best way to do this?
Hi Ivan, I might need a little more information on the exact people who need to see this in Wrike and who the emails are being sent/received by.
Though there are two possibilities I'd recommend right now. First is our email integration (which I think you're fairly familiar with). Here you can email tasks directly to a Wrike folder as you mentioned above - good option but it's manual in a way so you need to remember to add Wrike location.
To help automate this somewhat you could use the below.
Our Zapier Integration. Depending on what email server you use, you can create a Zap between Wrike and your email inbox so that incoming emails with certain criteria (e.g. keywords or a certain subject line text) automagically creates a task in Wrike with the email's details. We use it on the Community Team to automate some email-to-task items and it works perfectly.
What do you think? Interested in hearing from others on this too.
How do you achieve the same approval process with your billing team. Post below 👍
Hi Stephen, sorry for the slow response as I was away for a few days....
So today we do not have any type of workflow at all, which is why this is a bit more difficult as I am not replicating a working system in Wrike (like I have done for most other things we use). In this case today our bills come to our controller who matches them against a PO and if all looks okay enters into the system so it shows on the A/P reports to ultimately be paid. If a discrepancy he manually gives a copy to the person placing the order for resolution, once resolved it gets entered to get into A/P for payment.
The problem is many invoices are getting processed because they match a PO but there is no verification the work on a jobsite is actually done. So if a supplier bills us appropriately but early, we cant catch it.
My goal is to have each bill related to a project (not overhead) go into the system for approval by a project manager.
I am a bit afraid of email overload on notifications but hoping I can get that under control with settings.
We could certainly do the email integration. That would work well even though it adds a step, but most people in my office dont understand the proper formatting (['s etc.).
The zapier integration is really interesting as we use Office 365. I am wondering if perhaps I should just setup an Accounts Payable email address so everything that goes to that email address gets picked up.... Have you seen anyone do anything like that? It could be assigned to the same person and he would have to manually add our project manager but that is a bit simpler and eliminates the scanning etc. as we could go digital with many of our bills.
Hi Ivan, thanks for the information. There are certainly ways to make this process more efficient.
Funnily enough, we did something similar here with on the Community team with Zapier. Bear with me while I take you through it as I think a lot of the below will be useful for you.
So, I wanted a way to discuss Community posts with people within Wrike, like our Product Team, support etc. and of course we wanted to use our single source of truth - Wrike 🙃
I decided to create a new generic email address and created a new user profile within our Wrike account too from this generic email address. Using this Wrike 'user', I followed all Community forums; Product feedback, How To etc.
I then created a Zapier integration with this new account, which recognised any notification emails I received from Community (because I followed each topic) and then Zapier automatically generated a Task in Wrike from the email, with the full body of the email text in the task description.
This gave me a task wherein I could communicate with anyone internally by using @mentions in the comments. It also gave me a list of incoming activity from Community so I can ensure no post or comment here goes unseen.
We still use this process - here's how it looks:
If I needed to wait for any internal info from other teams, I can assign myself and reschedule the task so I can respond when I have the right info - the possibilities around managing posts and comments were fantastic once the information was in Wrike as a task.
Pretty nifty!
So for you, you could easily create a accounts email address where things are Cc'd to, our directly sent, to this address. Then create an integration via Zapier which turns these emails into tasks once received.
One thing, if you do this from your own account, it will show up as your user profile creating this stuff in Wrike - maybe that's ok. If you'd rather you might want to set up a new user on the account in Wrike that, sort of, acts as an 'independent' bot for the Zapier integration - but that's totally up to you.
Please let me know how you get on, and please ask me any questions and I'll be happy to help 👍