Accounts Payable Overview

The DaFIS Accounts Payable (AP) module is a collection of documents in DaFIS used to make payments to vendors, employees, and individuals. The AP module is linked to the DaFIS Purchasing module, providing a complete Purchasing/Payable system. It is important that the information on purchasing documents is complete and correct, in order to ensure that the payments made on the AP documents can be processed efficiently and accurately.

What are the AP documents?

There are AP documents for:

making payments directly against a purchasing document (Vendor Invoice)
making payments in situations where a purchasing document was not created (Direct Charge)
processing a credit issued by a vendor (Vendor Credit Memo).

There are also AP documents for processing travel (Travel Expense Voucher) and entertainment (Entertainment Expense Voucher) expenses, although the use of these documents has been mostly replaced by MyTravel.

How does the AP process work?

The AP process begins when a department has a bill to pay. The appropriate AP document is created in the department; the information on the AP document should match the information on the vendor's invoice. Once the AP document has been completed and is routed through the appropriate departmental approvals, it goes to the Accounts Payable department for final approval.

The initiating department sends hardcopy backup documents (i.e. invoices) to AP for each AP transaction. Because these hardcopy documents are scanned in AP, it is important not to highlight information on the document. Highlighting can create a dark circle around the area, gray the area, or even black out the whole area on the scanned document.

Accounts Payable reviews the DaFIS document for appropriate tax codes, remit-to vendor, and payment amount, which should match the payment due on the vendor’s invoice.

When is the check written?

An automated process is used to generate checks. The process is run every night to produce checks from each of the payable documents that has received final approval from Accounts Payable. The daily check-write process will pay against documents that:

have an open AP status;
have a scheduled payment date of today or earlier; and
do not have any indication that this payment should be made by another type of disbursement (i.e. bank wire, foreign bank draft).

At this point, a check would generally be processed; exceptions would occur if there was a levy against the vendor, or if an outstanding credit issued by the vendor was greater than the amount currently owed.

What resources can assist with AP processing?

There are several AP reports in DaFIS Decision Support, including the Payment/Credit Lookup (112).
Visit the Accounts Payable Web site for additional resources that can assist.

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