Hi There,

September is over and we're into the final quarter of 2024! 

Our team has been hard at work behind the scenes this month, laying the foundations for a number of critical improvements:

- Attachment storage is currently being overhauled, to ensure we can store & expose all critical documents via our APIs.

- Advanced features for Expenses are well underway, with great progress towards reconciling Credit Card transactions.

- Enhancements to our new Invoice Extraction functionality, which help ensure dates match the original document.

Invoice Transaction Summary

Before authorizing payment of an invoice, it is critical that all required information has been reviewed. For our US customer base, this may mean additional reviews outside of the organisation, and possibly at state level.

To help ensure all critical information is easily accessible, we have introduced a new "Transaction Summary" document. This PDF is generated once the Invoice reaches the Invoice Accepted state, as that usually means the invoice is guaranteed to be paid.

This document is currently available through the UI as a new option: 

The document itself is a new standard PDF. You can see it contains a range of useful information to help answer key questions:

- Who is the Invoice for and for how much?

- What order lines was it Invoiced against, and has receiving been completed?

- What approvals were undertaken to arrive at this invoice?

In a future release this document will be optionally available in our cXML outbound invoice integration endpoint.

What's coming

Outside of the larger changes above, we have some really neat features coming soon! These include AI auto-categorization when creating non-catalog items and new date range options when scheduling reports. 

Hi there,

We're really excited to announce enhancements to our Supplier Request process will be available this coming Monday, 23rd Sept, in our demo and production environments.

If you haven't tried our Supplier Request process in the past, the feature allows buyers to ask to trade with a Supplier that they can't currently access. Each Community has flexibility with our Forms to determine what questions must be completed, and your Supplier Enablement teams have the ability to approve or decline each request. In some cases, the Supplier may already be available in your Community, but the specific Buyer does not belong to the right Buyer Group - you can update this as part of approving the request.

What's Changed?

Supplier Requests no longer need to be assigned to an individual user! Buyers don't need to struggle figuring out which Supplier Enablement team member to select.

Any user that you give the 'Supplier Request Administrator' role will have the ability to:

- Approve or decline any Supplier Request task. No more delays if a specific admin is away on leave!

- Review tasks in the regular Task Digest. If you haven't set this up, check out details here.

- Update Buyer Groups in case a Buyer needs different access.

- Review the history of who approved/declined each request and any comments they added.

When you onboard a new member of your Supplier Enablement team, we'll automatically assign any open Supplier Requests to them.

For end users, the process couldn't be simpler, just select Supplier Request from the Marketplace Dashboard and fill out the details in the form:

Supplier Requests can be enabled in the Administration module, so we encourage you to revisit this feature in Demo or reach out to our team with any questions!

What's Next

We've heard a lot of great feedback on the new Create Invoice screen and are making some further improvements to this screen! Our first version of AI data extraction is now working, and we're consistently scanning Invoice Dates and Invoice Numbers. We will have more to share soon on how to get your community using this scanning! 

Outside of invoicing, a large range of improvements are underway in our Expenses module, stay tuned for more details.

Hi There,

We're still busy improving our new Create Invoice screen, and have had really useful feedback so far! If you are ready to switch over to this screen in Production, please get in touch.

Alongside that work, we're continuing to address key pain points across Unimarket. Our goal is to help avoid situations where your users get stuck, or need to restart what they're doing, ultimately saving valuable time.

Order Submission

In a lot of situations, not just with retrofit orders, you may not want to send a Purchase Order to a supplier. It may have already been fulfilled, or the supplier might be processing the order and you just need to record the details in Unimarket.

As part of our Editing Requisition functionality, Buyers and Approvers now have the option to edit the Order Submission. If you really want to avoid sending the Order to the supplier, just update it! No more needing to recreate the entire Requisition and go through the whole approval workflow again.

If you're not currently using this feature, you can find out more about it here.

Commenting on Orders

It's now possible to select a User when commenting on an Order. That user will receive a special email notification, so you can chase them up on receiving or ask them to take a look at the Order details.

This is just the first part of a wider change, and does assume the mentioned user has access to the Order.

We've heard that Requisitions would be a great follow up for this feature, but let us know other areas you'd like to see this!

Other Enhancements this month

- When viewing a Product's Item Details, we display the date it came back to Unimarket from a Roundtrip catalog. Helpful when discussing pricing!

- Supplier Invitations now show which user created the invitation.

- Contracts can now be archived, if you just want to remove them completely.

What's Coming

Enhancements to our Supplier Request process are mostly complete. Expect to see this in September!

We've also started on Invoice Data Extraction via AI, where we will scan your Invoice document and use the data to populate our Create Invoice screen. We already have key information like the Invoice Number, Invoice Date and Order Date working and are hard at work filling in other information. 

Finally the ability to choose a Default Justification per Supplier is due for release within the next fortnight. We'll have a special announcement for that one!

Hi There,

We've been hard at work implementing new functionality this month, and have a range of improvements to help you manage users easily! 🎉 

We're currently gathering feedback on our new Create Invoice screen. If you've had a chance to try this in Demo, let us know your thoughts!

Default Attention

Often a buyer will need items delivered to a room or lab number, or a centralized receiving department or reception area. 

We've added a new personalization setting in My Account where users can set their Default Attention. 

Rather than just using their Name, this default will be used in Checkout, ensuring goods aren't misplaced or delayed!

Default Account Code

A similar option to the above, you can define a default account code for each user, which might be where their spend is usually allocated outside of project work. 

We've added a column to our User Upload so you can quickly get this in place for all users. 

If you've been holding back on this feature, now might be a good time to check it out! More details are available in our help material - here.

Users Creation & Deactivation

We know many of our customers are concerned with when a user was created or deactivated within Unimarket. 

To help audit this, we have added a new filter in the Users menu:

The Users Export also contains two new fields for each date.

Changing the Buyer on an Order

It's normal for users to change roles, take holidays or possibly even leave your organization. Purchase Orders still need to be processed and assigned to an active user though! 

To help quickly and efficiently manage staff changes, you can now Update Buyers in Bulk from the View Orders menu:

Having the right buyer in place will help avoid delays in processing orders, receiving items or ensuring invoices are paid on time.

Other Enhancements this month

- Supplier Requests are now included in the Tasks Digest. More changes in this space are coming very soon!

- We've revamped the Attachments Required settings for Expenses. This can be set at Claim or Line level, and only applies on Submit, not when saving.

- Requisitions now include Line Numbers!

- Received an email about a comment? The email subject now includes who wrote it!

What's Coming

We're hard at work improving the Create Invoice screen and our Supplier Request process.

Beyond this we'll be adding support for Invoice Data Extraction, offering another way of efficiently processing Invoices and ensuring you have accurate data.

Stay tuned for the ability to choose a Default Justification at Supplier level, that should be released in August!

Procurement teams are continually looking for ways to understand spend by category to drive insights and ultimately savings. However, asking buyers to manually categorize everything or mapping all categories manually is an overhead most organizations don't take on. The result is a glaring hole in your data.

Lucky for you Unimarket has introduced new AI Category Matching that reads and understands what you are purchasing and automatically assigns a UNSPSC category to your spend. Unimarket AI will automatically categorize your items whether it's a Laptop or Peanut Butter! Users can say goodbye to manual categorization (or no categorization), and with a little AI magic procurement teams can say hello to better spend analysis. 

We've started with categorization on invoices and will look to add this everywhere a category is needed. 

Getting through all the invoices your organization processes every month is a heavy lift for your Accounts Payable team. Doing this accurately and at speed is critical to ensure your organization stays on top of it's financial commitments and suppliers are paid on time. 

With this in mind we've spent the past few months researching and redesigning our invoice processing screen to ensure Unimarket gives your organization the tools to process invoices quickly and accurately. The new Create Invoice screen hosts an all new UI and clever features to make it easier and quicker to process invoices. 

Thank you to all those customers that provided valuable feedback. The new Create Invoice is now available for review in Demo, and can be enabled in Production when you're ready to make the move to faster invoice processing! In the coming months we will be introducing further efficiency through the addition of AI assisted document extraction so you can take speed to the next level. 

Here are some of the highlights of the new screen.

Our Attachment Previewer can show your real invoice in-line. Prefer to show this on a second monitor? Just switch off Preview:

Want to Invoice an Order or create a Retrofit? You can do that all in one screen now, just leave the Order Number blank as needed:

As you select different Order Types, we'll show relevant information. Here is an example of a Blanket:

And this is from a standard order:

There are loads more great features in the screen and we can't wait for you to try these out! 

If you would like to watch a walkthrough video of the screen in action, you can access this here.

Hi There! 

The Unimarket Marketplace just got a supercharge: smarter catalogs, supplier numbers at your fingertips and streamlined non-catalog ordering! 

Marketplace Dashboard

One of our goals with the marketplace dashboard is to get users to the right suppliers and catalogs as quickly as possible! 

One way we approached this was remembering the last catalog a user purchased from and promoting this ahead of any others from a specific supplier. 

Your feedback told us that this can be misleading, and we will now showing a shortcut to the full list of each suppliers catalogs instead. 

If they only have one catalog, that’s easy, we’ll show you that one 🙂

As part of this change, the Dashboard's supplier count will help keep track of how many you have available. 

This count works with any search terms or filters you have currently applied!

Create a Non-Catalog Item

Often catalog purchasing is not an option and users need to use the non-catalog process. 

To help ensure compliance with your community’s requirements, you can now select a Default Form for use in the Admin section for Procurement. Details of our complete range of Procurement Administration settings can be found here.

This form will be the default Item Type when creating a non-catalog item. This will speed up the creation process and ensure users complete all required information the first time!

Your feedback makes all the difference in improving Unimarket, please keep sharing any suggestions you have.

More exciting features are coming later this month!

Hey there!

This month we've released a new feature to help manage supplier registrations, a number of improvements for our Contracts Notifications, and a new option for cleaning up Supplier Invitations in bulk.

Supplier Registration - Foreign Currencies

When a Supplier receives an invitation to register, we give them the option to choose a currency. Consistent feedback told us that customers want suppliers to record transactions in the same currency (eg: If I operate in USD, the supplier should use USD). 

Having the supplier register in a different currency creates a lot of downstream confusion and can even cause breaking errors in your integrated finance system. 

We now have a new setting, Allow Foreign Currencies, that can be set on your Registration tab. This is a global setting, and if switched off, any new suppliers must register in your currency:

If you only want suppliers to transact in USD, make sure this is switched off.

We're interested in your feedback on applying this setting to each individual registration. This could be a beneficial enhancement as it may allow you to make an exception for individual suppliers. 

Let us know if you'd be interested in this, or any other feedback on this feature!

Other Enhancements this month

These are due to release this coming weekend (29th June):

• Our Contract Expiry warnings will correctly check if the Contract is active or not. As you update the Contract status, the warnings will reflect the changes!
• We have a number of new options on Contract Notifications to make them recurring. You could use these to create a reminder to review the contract pricing monthly, quarterly or annually, or any other contract detail you might want to regularly check.
• The Supplier Invitation upload now includes a 'Cancel Invitation' column. Set this to 'Y' to cleanup and remove existing invitations.

What's Coming

Details on our new Create Invoice screen will be available in the next two weeks! 

We're also starting to look at enhancements to our Supplier Request process. With these changes, any user will be able to action any request, rather than assigning requests to specific users. Look out for that one within the July-September quarter!

Hello!

We're back with a major new enhancement to our Invoice Inbox, and we're excited to share that our new Create Invoice screen is rapidly approaching go live! You'll be able to try this out in Demo by the end of June.

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Invoice Inbox Export

Consistent feedback from the Invoice Inbox has shown us that customers want to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of their AP processes. One simple metric available is to compare the Date when an Invoice arrived in the Inbox against the Date when an Invoice was actually created within Unimarket.

Our new Invoice Inbox export will help you understand your AP processes, ensure thinks are running smoothly and identify any trends or complex suppliers. The Export respects all filters and any search criteria you have entered within the Inbox as well, so make sure to take off the Ready status for a complete picture!

There are a number of columns included in this first version, but if you have any other suggestions or data you'd like to report on from the Inbox, let us know!

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Other Enhancements this month

• Our Account Number field will display successfully from Supplier to Purchase Order PDF. We've relabeled this field to avoid any confusion with Account Codes!
• If you use both our outbound Order cXML and our Contracts module, we have additional Contract data that can be sent back on the Order.
• Improvements to the Org Unit Upload to better support loading Account Codes.
• Improvements to our Lite to Registered feature to better support existing Registered & Premium suppliers.

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What's Coming

More details on our new Create Invoice screen are coming very soon! 

Hi again!

We hope those of you in the US enjoyed attending our Day of Collaboration earlier in April & the sneak peak of our upcoming Product enhancements. The team is hard at work finalizing our new combined Create Invoices screen and this will be ready for use later in the quarter.

This month we released a number of improvements across Unimarket. We'd encourage you to revisit some of our features like Shopping Lists or Invoice Reminders if you're not currently using these.

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Shopping Lists

When a user saves a non-catalog item to their Shopping List, they can now come back and edit the details. As price changes over time, they can keep re-using & updating the item, without needing to create a brand new record. 

This will help University staff save time when reordering teaching materials or making other recurring purchases.

As part of this change, we will now identify which user created a shared shopping list:

We have more ideas to help make shared lists as effective as possible, so please reach out to us with any suggestions!

File Processing

We've expanded access to the File Processing menu so that users with the Create Invoices role can see Invoice & Payment uploads. 

Interested in seeing how file automation could benefit your community? Learn more here - Unimarket File Automation

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Other Enhancements this month

• Our Invoice Reminder will now exclude weekends and public holidays. No more reminder spam!
• The View Expenses search box now allows either Name or Number searching.
• The Unimarket Invoices - All report now contains the following:
  • Account Code information when an Invoice has not yet matched.
  • On Behalf Of user information for Retrofit Invoices, where an Order has not yet been created.

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What's Coming

We have an update coming on Shipping Matching, a new range of settings which you may like to adopt within the Invoicing module.

In addition to the Create Invoices screen, we will also soon be releasing Unimarket's first use of AI. Watch this space!