The Public Contract Regulations 2015 require us to publish our performance on paying suppliers within 30 days.
To ensure we can track our performance we have made some changes to invoice registration. Please be aware of the following:
- The “Trans date” field on Agresso, should record the date on the invoice, not the date the invoice is being registered.
- We need to record the date on which the invoice was first received in the University. Where invoices are initially received in the Payments, our staff will record the date of receipt. For invoices that are sent by suppliers directly to a School or Department it will be necessary for the School or Department to record the date on which the invoice was first received by them. For non-POP invoices this should be marked on the invoice. For POP invoices this date should be entered when registering the invoice, using the “Date rec’d” field on the data entry screen (care should be taken so as not to tab through this field inadvertently.)
- We need to record where it has not been possible to process an invoice within 30 days for valid reasons (e.g. the goods are faulty), so that the University’s performance is not understated. We have introduced a new field on the data entry screen called “Disputed”. The entry in this field should be “N” where there have been no problems attributable to the supplier that have prevented an invoice from being processed in a timely manner. “N” should also be used when it has not been possible to process the invoice quickly through some fault of the University (e.g. backlogs of work). Where a valid reason has led to a delay in processing an invoice then one of the attributes between 01 and 08 should be entered when the invoice is finally processed for payment. Again to provide an audit trail, a brief summary of why the invoice has been delayed should appear on the invoice.
These changes will be put in place from 3rd July 2017 to enable the recording of performance to be in place before the start of the new financial year in August.
Please contact the Payments Office with any queries about non-POP invoices. For queries about POP invoices please contact the Procurement Office.