Hi there!

Happy leap year! In addition to improvements in the supplier registration space, we've released several enhancements this month that will help address key pain points.

Supplier Registration, Invitation & Lite to Registered

These features are now live in production for all customers. We hope that these streamline supplier management and increase the number of suppliers who register! 

Highlights from this month

• A new setting is available in Expenses to make attachments mandatory. We heard this feedback from a number of customers and wanted to make this available as soon as possible. We've got ideas for improving this and will build on it in a future release.
• The File Processing menu can now be filtered by Purpose or State. You can use these filters to quickly find any files that had errors, or files of a specific type, such as Invoices, Suppliers or Approval configuration.
• We've improved the performance of our Users upload. This has always been a complex upload, we really wanted it to process more efficiently and with less friction!

What's Coming

A major revamp of our invoice creation process is currently underway. Our existing screens are split into different flows depending on whether an order is present or not, and we know that information is not always clearly laid out. Our new screen will allow you to switch between having an order present or creating a retrofit / after the fact invoice easily. We also have some neat new tricks for viewing the invoice attachment on screen, and viewing critical order information. 

Beyond these changes, we're exploring solutions to support document scanning, and plan to integrate this into invoice creation to help speed up the Accounts Payable process even further!

With ever increasing compliance requirements, supplier registration is a critical step for customers and suppliers alike. Customers need suppliers to register and provide their company information, and suppliers just want to get registered quickly and painlessly so they can start transacting with customers. 

To streamline this process, we've completely rebuilt our supplier Invitation email and the registration page to ensure the process is simple, suppliers understand what you need, and ultimately more suppliers register! 

We also happen to think it looks a lot nicer… and people like nice things 🙂

These changes are now available in Demo & will be released to Production before the end of February.

Here's an example of the new Invitation email, including our new header banner which you can customize: 

This is an example of our new Registration screen:

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to onboard and connect with your suppliers. To date, the task of inviting suppliers to register and chasing them to complete the registration has been a bit of a headache. Often customers are stuck waiting for registration to be completed before they can use the supplier.

This latest update strips away all that complexity by allowing customers to simply load all their suppliers and with a tick of a box invite them to register. Suppliers can be used immediately with no hanging around waiting for registration, and once complete we automatically convert them to Registered so your community can start receiving supplier updates. If you forgot to invite a supplier that happens to register later (or was registered already), no problem, you can convert them to Registered. Easy as!

These changes are now available in Demo & will be released to Production before the end of February. 

You can find the Convert to Registered option when viewing a Lite Supplier from Community Administration:

Further details on Unimarket File Automation, including Supplier Uploads, can be found here:

Unimarket File Automation

Hi again!

We hope you had a restful holiday period over Christmas and New Year! It's hard to believe that January has already been and gone. Our team took this time to really dig into a lot of customer pain points, and you'll find a range of enhancements based on your feedback below.

Creating Lite Suppliers

When creating a lite supplier, it's important that key supplier information is captured in one place. To help drive efficiency, we've included the following fields in the Create popup:

• Category
• Payment Term
• Tax Rate
• Tax Registered (NZ & AU only)
• NZBN (NZ only)

Exports

You may have noticed that Exports from Unimarket were limited to 1 years worth of data. Our latest update includes a number of performance enhancements, that have allowed us to drop this time-based restriction and put in a maximum number of records instead. This will allow you much greater flexibility, you could export all Orders across 5 years for a particular supplier, or all invoices for all time in the Pending Invoice Acceptance state. 

Other Enhancements this month

• Contract Workflows are now sorted to show the newest events first.
• Shopping Lists are sorted alphabetically, with your Favourites still at the top.
• It's now possible to add an attachment to an Expense Claim even after it's pending or approved. We're planning to extend this to the Expenses themselves soon.
• Blanket Orders now support a separate ID pattern from other Order Types. This will help admins and end users easily identify blankets, and ensure alignment with the IDs held in your finance system. Ask your Account Manager if you'd like to learn more about this!
• The Invoice Export and report now include Buyer information for Retrofit Invoices. When a Retrofit Invoice is waiting for the Buyer to action it, you'll be able to see their details and chase them up much more easily.

What's Coming

We've been diving into current challenges within supplier registration and supplier creation. Registration is the number one source of support requests from suppliers so we've focused on making it simpler and we've given it a makeover. A long standing need has also been the ability to convert a Lite supplier into a Registered supplier so you can smoothly manage this transition as your suppliers complete the registration process. It will soon be possible to automatically or manually convert a Lite supplier into its Registered equivalent rather than swapping from one to the other. 

Hi there! 

Check out the great new features added over November.

Splitting Invoice Attachments

One of our product focus areas is to ensure invoices can be processed more efficiently in your organization. Following discussions with customers, a key frustration was the additional work created when a supplier submits more than 1 invoice attached to a single email in the inbox. This latest update includes the ability to automatically split out invoices if they arrive in your inbox attached to a single email so that your AP team can deal with them efficiently.

A few highlights of this feature:

• Suppliers can upload multiple files in 1 email and the inbox automatically splits the invoices into separate emails for easy processing
• All spam items like logo images are suppressed on the original email so you can easily see the invoice.... from the other email junk!

Other changes this month

• We have made further budget improvements to make it easier for budget administrators to view their overall spend
• We have added a Supplier Tags filter to the marketplace so your buyers can easily filter and find  the right suppliers 

Stay tuned for more news about our new supplier management and invite improvements!

Hi there! 

Check out the great new features added over October.

Uploading Invoices against Blanket Orders

Almost all organizations have a handful of suppliers that regularly submit invoices with a large number of lines, such as utility or mobile phone bills. To make the task of processing these much less time-consuming we have added a new invoice file upload for your blanket orders. Our new blanket order invoice upload allows you to streamline large invoices by automating invoice creation using a CSV file. Just submit your invoice files into the designated sFTP folder and we will automatically create the invoices and route them to the owner of the blanket order for review and acceptance.

A few highlights of this feature:

• The upload file supports all of the account codes and splits
• The solution performs a series of checks to ensure your data is correct and the file loads smoothly

Learn more about this feature here:

Upload Invoices against Blankets

Supplier Invitations

We've made visual improvements to our Supplier Invitation screen to help keep invitations rolling smoothly! 

Other changes

• It's now possible to filter the Administration -> Suppliers page by the Supplier Type. This will help you quickly find any Lite, Registered or Premium suppliers and easily manage their data.
• In a similar vein, we've added Supplier ID and Supplier Tags to our Invoices Export. We've heard from some customers that this will be a great benefit when categorizing suppliers for 1099 reporting!

Stay tuned for more news about our new Budgets module, which is nearing release!

What is eInvoicing?

eInvoicing is the electronic exchange of invoice information directly between a supplier's system and a Unimarket buyer community. eInvoicing removes the need for suppliers and buyers to generate and process PDF and paper invoices which reduces processing costs and administration.

Unimarket eInvoicing

Unimarket has offered electronic invoicing with suppliers for more than 10 years, however, the difficulty has always been making this technology available and affordable for smaller suppliers. Enter Peppol which is a global standard adopted by the Australian and New Zealand Government that focuses on allowing both large and small suppliers to submit their invoices electronically rather than by PDF. Essentially any supplier with a Peppol-compliant finance application such as Xero or MYOB will have the option to send you invoices electronically using this standard. The result is less work for your AP team, improved data capture, and increased accuracy.

Unimarket now supports receipt and processing of eInvoices using the Peppol standard so that you can transition your organisation towards electronic invoicing and drive further savings. Peppol is available to Australian and New Zealand customers so please contact your account team if you would like further information or to get set up on the Peppol network.

Information relating to the Australian and New Zealand eInvoicing initiatives can be found here.

Further details on Unimarket electronic invoicing can be found here:

Unimarket Electronic Invoicing

Hey! 

Check out the great new features added over August and September. 

Comments on Invoices

Comments on orders were a smash hit, so we've followed this up with the addition of comments on invoices. You can now record comments to keep an eye on the status of Invoices, ask your buyers for additional information or record important notes. 

Learn more about this feature here:

Comment on Invoices

Automatically Close Old Incomplete Requisitions

Old incomplete requisitions can start to build up in the system as users leave or change roles. To help spring clean, we now have a new setting that will help you automatically cancel any Incomplete Requisitions more than 2 years old.

Reporting Updates

Our Unimarket Order Report has been updated to include a currency conversion for orders placed in a foreign currency. We've also added an extra column for the Requester.

Did you know Unimarket offers a range of standard reports to help suit your needs? You can read more about these here:

Unimarket Reports

We have several larger initiatives in the pipeline and look forward to sharing more details soon!

In our latest release, we're giving communities more control over the Suppliers that are available for non-catalog purchasing. If the supplier supports these types of items, you can now select the "Allow Non-Catalog Purchasing" setting in the Supplier Administration menu.

This will allow you to offer Non-Catalog purchasing as an option, but finely tune which vendors your Buyers are accessing and steer them toward catalog purchasing if it's more appropriate.

Other Enhancements in this release

• When reassigning a requisition, the note is now optional.
• When creating a comment on an order, we will email the relevant users (including Available To users on a blanket order).
• The Task Digest now includes the subtotal & item description for individual items awaiting Requisition Approval.

5th August

12th August

We've updated our comments functionality so that it's now available on Orders! You can use this to keep track of notes or add critical information and updates to your orders. Comments are available on all order types, including blankets, release, retrofit & standard.

We've also added the ability to choose what time the Task Digest is sent each day. Select the Custom option if you'd like to change the time of day, or schedule this multiple times a day (perhaps once in the morning and once in the afternoon).

If you haven't used the Task Digest and would like to try it, please take a look at our help article here.

22nd July

29th July