We're excited to announce a powerful new feature in our marketplace: our brand new product comparison tool! 

We know how challenging it can be to find the perfect item to purchase, and we built this tool to make the decision-making process for buyers faster and easier.

Now, you can select and compare products side-by-side in a clear, easy-to-read table. This table gives you a head-to-head view of key details like:

• Price: Quickly see which option fits your budget.
• Supplier: Identify your trusted vendors at a glance.
• Description: Get a clear overview of features and benefits.
• Code & Manufacturer Part ID: Ensure you're looking at the right product every time.

To get started with this comparison, search for any hosted catalog item in the marketplace. 

Whether you prefer Grid or List view, select the Add to Compare option:

You can also do this when viewing a specific item

This new tool is designed to give you all the information you need in one place, so you can make confident, informed decisions and find the best value for your business.

We've had some great feedback on this feature already and are actively considering these improvements:

- Comparing Index-roundtrip and RFQ items in addition to Hosted

- Saving your comparison as a permanent Shopping List.

Ready to find your perfect match? Start comparing today!

Hey everyone!

New Unimarket Updates Are Here!

During July we've added a number of improvements to help you manage your spend smoothly!

Major refreshes to our Contract Creation and Bid Request Creation are currently underway, and both of these should be available soon!

Contracts

To help with with the management of contracts, we've made a number of enhancements:

1. Contract Workflow Tasks are now sortable:

This will allow users to quickly find the tasks they need to action, or prioritize those that are long overdue!

2. We have a new Initial End Date field on all Contracts, which is separate from the End Date. This will help you track renewals and extensions as your contracts move through their lifecycles and compare them to the original bounds of the contract.

3. We have a new role coming for Contracts which will allow users to view any Contracts available to their Organization Units (or child ones below). This is very similar to our Sharing functionality, see more details here.

Account Codes

We've also made some important usability changes in this space!

1. It's now much clearer which parts of an Account Code format are mandatory:

2. If you're using our Validate Account Code integration, a new warning message will direct the user to any Account Codes that need attention!

Invoicing

To help ensure timely Invoice processing, we've made the following changes

1. 1099 Reporting Codes are now included as part of our Invoice Export and standard Invoice Report. We've also made these more prominent on the View Invoice screen.

2. More Attachment types are now supported in the Invoice Inbox, even if they are under 30KB. See details here.

3. Wanting to measure cycle time, or time between an Invoice arriving in the Inbox versus it's Creation? Make sure to use our Inbox Export, now including the Invoice Date! You can learn more about this here.

What's Coming

If you take a look in Demo, you'll notice our brand new Compare Page in the Marketplace. 

This page allows buyers & browsers to easily compare different catalog products and make informed decisions on pricing. 

We're wrapping up a couple of enhancements to this page before we roll it out to production later this month!

Say Goodbye to 1099 Headaches!

For our US customers, tax season often brings a unique set of challenges, especially when it comes to 1099 reporting for contractors and non-employed suppliers. We've heard your feedback loud and clear: the manual process of identifying 1099-applicable invoices and tracking spend can be a major drain on your time and resources.

That's why we're thrilled to announce powerful new functionality in Unimarket designed to make your 1099 reporting process effortless!

Gone are the days of manually reviewing every single invoice to determine its 1099 status. Our new features empower you to take control and streamline your workflow, ensuring accuracy and saving you countless hours.

How Our New 1099 Reporting Works:

We've built this functionality into our new Create Invoice screen, and the codes can be configured to match any integrated ERP system:

• Easy Activation & Pre-populated Income Types: Simply enable 1099 Reporting within your community, and all IRS income types (like Nonemployee Compensation - NC) will be automatically populated in a clear format.
• Default & Supplier-Level Overrides: Define a default 1099 reporting code for your organization, and easily override it at the individual supplier level when needed.
• Automated Invoice Tagging: With each invoice, the default 1099 Reporting code will be automatically populated, significantly reducing manual effort.
• Invoice-Specific Overrides: Need to adjust a specific invoice? No problem! You can easily override the 1099 code inside Create Invoice.
• Seamless Finance System Integration: All 1099 information is integrated directly back into your finance system (e.g., Banner) via our Outbound Invoice integration, ensuring a single source of truth.

Here is a sample of the Administration screen, where you can choose specific codes you want to use and exclude any that aren't relevant:

Within Create Invoice you can just use the default, select a different 1099 code, or even flag an Invoice as Not 1099 Reportable:

With this feature enabled, few invoices will require manual intervention from your Accounts Payable team, freeing up significant time. With our integration changes, data will be synchronized to your finance system. Generating required reports will be streamlined, quick and painless!

You can find more details on this functionality here.

For all our customers across the globe, we have some more exciting updates coming later this month, both in the Invoicing module and more generally across Unimarket. 

Stay tuned for more news soon!

Hey everyone!

New Unimarket Updates Are Here!

We've just dropped hotly-requested enhancements to Supplier Documents and RFQ Communications.

Next week: 1099 Reporting details for US customers! And exciting news, AI Invoice Extraction is right around the corner!

Supplier Documents

Communities have had the ability to load documents onto their Suppliers for a long time. However this is only available in the main Documents tab, not the Business Classification or Insurance Certificate tabs.

It’s important that Communities are able to load a complete view of compliances without relying on Suppliers updating data, and our new functionality will allow you to upload all document types:

The Show to Buyers checkbox can be used to display these documents in the Supplier Store in the Marketplace. This can help ensure Buyers have visibility of all required documents to make an informed purchasing decision.

You can find more information about this feature here.

RFQ Email Template

Communities now have the option to save an email template to be prepopulated in the Request Quote process. This is important to ensure consistent messaging and that suppliers receive all critical information.

This email builder can be found in a new tab in Community Admin → Modules → Procurement → Management → called RFQ Email

For more details on this and all our other Procurement settings, see here.

Expenses Professional enhancements

We've been seeing some great feedback from customers adopting Expenses Pro. Recently we've added:

- The ability to Archive any Credit Card Transactions or Receipts that aren't required, helping ensure Disputed payments don't stay stuck in the system!

- New filtering options, such as filtering by state.

- Better handling of Declined expenses, so that Credit Card Transactions & Receipts can be assigned to a new Expense Claim and submitted successfully.

What's Coming

Stay tuned for more news on 1099 Reporting in the coming week!

Hi there

We recently released a number of changes in our Invoicing module to make life easier for your Accounts Payable teams, especially when working in the Invoice Inbox. 

We'll have more updates later this month with additional enhancements to both the Invoice Inbox & Create Invoice screen, as well as an update on our upcoming Invoice Extraction features.

Tags Filter

We know a lot of customers utilise tags to help manage which team member is assigned to an Invoice, whether an item is currently on Hold or all sorts of other states.

We've just introduced a new filter option, which will let you see any items without tags. Just select the "No Tag Assigned" option at the top to filter down to these!

Attachment Handling

We have now improved our attachment filtering within the Invoice Inbox. There are two key highlights:

- Any suspicious files are automatically removed without blocking the whole Invoice Item. You can still process the message within the Invoice Inbox, but feel safe that the file has been removed!

- Any files under a 30KB limit will be automatically removed. This limit has been set to filter out any email signature images and other small files that might be attached. This excludes any PDFs and any Email Subject files if you're using that feature.

For more information on this filtering, please refer to our help documentation here.

Expenses - Sortable Columns

One more feature to highlight for our users in the expenses module. In the View Expenses menu we now allowing sorting on certain columns. This will help you quickly identify expenses as per your rules and get them reimbursed quickly!

What's Coming

Stay tuned for more news in the coming week!

Hi again,

We're excited to announce that our suite of Expense Pro features are now available and ready for use! 

If you haven't looked at our Expenses Management suite in the past, the module allows buyers to easily submit their expenses for reimbursement. It utilizes a great range of familiar Unimarket features: 

• Customize expense categories with automated workflows to ensure precise and accurate data.
• Easily attach supporting documents like receipts to each expense claim.
• Automatically capture accounting codes with every submission for seamless integration.
• Enable administrative staff to submit expense claims on behalf of others, streamlining the process.

With Expenses Pro, our key new features will help you Reconcile your Credit Card Transactions and simplify loading Receipts and other Attachments onto Expenses.

Full details of our Expenses offering are available here. Please reach out to our team if you're interested in exploring these more!

What's Changed?

If you currently issue credit cards to your buyers and allow them to make purchases with these, we have new automated support to bring those transactions into Unimarket. 

This can be done regularly via SFTP, or imported via our new menu:

The user can take these Credit Card transactions as the base to build out their Expense Claims & ensure they are costed to the right Account Codes and all other supporting information is present. 

Any outstanding transactions also form part of the emailed Tasks Digest. You'll notice the red icon in the top right of the image above, reminding the user to action these!

To help speed up the reconciliation, users will be able to email in their receipt attachments to our new Receipt Inbox. 

If the email address matches the email on their user profile, we'll automatically assign that to their User account. 

If you're familiar with our Invoice Inbox, this screen has been designed to work in a similar way, with great features like Notes and an expanded view of the Email contents.

Together, these new screens will help you speed up the Expense Claim creation:

We've also taken this time to address key pieces of feedback in Expenses

• It's now possible to comment on Expenses, this includes user mentioning.
• Our new Expenses Administrator role gives you more flexibility if you don't want to rely on Community Administrator.
• We're currently working in View Expenses to make the columns sortable.

What's Next

More change is coming to help with the Team Management of card transactions, and to give additional options in reporting and exporting.

There's a lot of work underway in our Invoicing module too, including AI data extraction, new options to help streamline 1099 reporting, and further enhancements to our Peppol e-Invoicing. We'll share details of these soon!

Hello and Happy New Year!

It's hard to believe we're almost in February.

Our team have been hard at work on several important features this month. We're also very close to sharing details of our brand new Professional Edition of the Expenses module. Look forward to more details next month!

Invoice Import

An exciting new feature in the Invoicing module allows you to import a csv file of Invoices, against standard or blanket orders. 

This feature speeds up invoice processing, and we've even seen some customers co-ordinate the file creation with their suppliers, saving even more time!

To access this import, make sure you're using the Create Invoices role and navigate to the View Invoices menu. You'll need to select the Import option on the right:

Unimarket will validate that the Invoice details are all complete, and then pass this through your standard Invoice Matching rules. 

You can find more details on the file format and upload process in our help documentation here.

Other Enhancements this month

- We've simplified commenting on Contracts. If you can see the Contract, you can add a comment.

- In addition to this, Contract Workflow tasks are now included in the Tasks Digest email.

- Expenses now gives a proper email notification when a mixture of Expense lines are Approved & Declined.

- Users submitting Supplier Requests must fill out all details of the Supplier, rather than searching for one that exists in Unimarket. Thanks to everyone who shared feedback in this area!

- Another suite of improvements to our new Create Invoice screen has been released. The highlights are improving our Preview component and ensuring all Invoice Administration settings are compatible with the screen.

What's Coming

Speaking of Create Invoice, we know that many customers are eagerly awaiting news on Invoice Data Extraction! This will be a big focus for our team in February, and we can't wait to have this up and running for you to try!

Outside of this and Expenses, look forward to enhancements to Scheduled Exports and further rollout of the ability to Mention Users in Comments.

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!