Duplicate Vendor Invoice Match in IDEA - Raise the Bar

Hi All,

While performing an exact (same) Duplicate Key Detection in IDEA on the fields Vendor Code, Vendor Invoice Reference and Vendor Invoice Amount in IDEA you may not receive any cases of potential duplicates owing to standard controls in the user Procure to Pay (P2P) application.

However, let us envisage a case where Vendor Invoice Reference 'a b-c/56-u' is booked again as 'ABC56u' against the same Vendor with the same amount, this case would not get detected directly through an exact (same) Duplicate Key Detection.

In such cases append a virtual character field titled 'Vendor Invoice Reference Cleaned' with the criteria/parameter @strip(@upper(Vendor Invoice Reference)).

This will convert 'a b-c/56-u' to ABC56U and 'ABC56u' to ABC56U. Now you can perform a straight match duplicate using IDEA.

Similarly if you have another sample cases like 'T*y~p_954a' and 'T  Y  P@95$4aZ' you will notice the extra 'Z' in 'T  Y  P@95$4aZ' which is a detractor.

Here you can reduce the manual cases for check by appending a virtual character field titled 'Vendor Invoice Reference NUM' with the criteria/parameter @justnumbers(@strip(Vendor Invoice Reference))

This will convert 'T*y~p_954a'  to 954 and 'T  Y  P@95$4aZ' to 954 too allowing for a straight match duplicate on the numeric part of the vendor invoice reference.

Also try and prepare a report in IDEA for same Vendor Invoice Reference and same Vendor Invoice Amount too.

This is done to catch cases where bill 'ABC124' is submitted by vendor 'ABC' but inadvertently paid off to vendor 'PQR'. Vendor 'ABC' follows up for the payment with yet another bill of the same reference which is paid of to 'ABC'. Hence we have two bills with the same reference and amount paid off to different vendors. We normally do not check for this combination. Try it you may identify such exceptional transactions too.

Kind Regards

Jairam