Document Delivery: Working with Invoices & Statements
CloudStreet Portal will transform the way your business shares information – with employees, customers, vendors and partners. Using data available from your ERP system, CloudStreet Portal gives users immediate access to documents generated by business transactions, without compromising the security of your back-end application or the associated database.
While CloudStreet Portal can be used to share many different types of business documents, most implementations will initially focus on providing access to digital invoices and statements from the Document Delivery Cloud.
Figure 1: Digital invoice and statement produced by CloudStreet Portal.
Who needs access to your invoices and statements?
Figure 2: Your Document Delivery Cloud will be accessed by many different types of users.
Your Accounts Receivable manager can deliver invoices and statements to customers through the portal, and can see whether customers have viewed the most recent statements. Accounts Payable managers at your customer sites can view digital invoices and statements, rather than mailed or faxed documents. Your sales staff can use CloudStreet Portal to track orders placed by customers. And, company management will have important information at their fingertips whenever they need it.
Individuals within and outside your organization need access to documents, and this need equates to potentially hundreds of users. With most document publishing systems, user management is an implementation nightmare for IT staff. Not with CloudStreet Portal! Instead, users manage themselves. Your organization issues an email to employees and customers, announcing the availability of digital invoices and statements from CloudStreet Portal. Users gain access to documents available on the portal using a simple, two-step process that does not require involvement from the site administrator. From the CloudStreet Portal website, users complete a simple registration process that requests only a username, password, and email address. Once registered, users utilize the subscription system to request access to invoices and statements.
To request document access, users complete the short Add Subscription Form, entering their user role (e.g., client employee), the document type for which they’d like access (e.g., invoice or statement), and their customer ID number. Once the user has submitted the subscription request, the next step is approval by an authorized individual. The subscription system’s approval process ensures that only individuals authorized to view invoices or statements will be granted access to the Document Delivery Cloud.
Figure 3: Users request access to documents using the Add Subscription Form.
Who approves subscription requests?
The CloudStreet Portal site administrator will decide who is authorized to approve subscription requests. Depending on the size of your portal user base, subscriptions might be reviewed and approved by the site administrator. However, if you'd like to offload that responsibility, a customer service representative within your organization or a client administrator located at each customer site can be appointed to approve subscription requests. The authorized individual will review each subscription and they will approve or deny the request. <em>Why should a real person validate subscription requests?</em> Users may be allowed to view one type of document (i.e., invoices), but not all document types (i.e., executive reports). In addition, it is possible for a user to inadvertently enter an incorrect customer number when completing the Add Subscription Form. The approval process intercepts these problems.
Site administrators have the ability to view all subscriptions submitted by portal users (approved, pending approval and denied).
Figure 4: Administrator view of site-wide subscriptions.
Working with documents
Once a user’s subscription request has been approved, they have direct access to the Document Delivery Cloud. From CloudStreet Portal, the user will be able to work with any document for which they have an approved subscription.
Figure 5: List of invoices and statements available to the user on the Document Delivery Cloud.
As shown in Figure 5, the list of available documents can be quite lengthy. Consequently, CloudStreet Portal provides you with many intuitive features that enable fast navigation, grouping, sorting, and selection of documents. To view a specific document, simply click on the document ID, document reference, or the View button (magnifying glass icon) adjacent to the row containing the document of interest.
Figure 6: Sample customer statement.
CloudStreet Portal provides numerous methods by which you can navigate within the line items of a statement, features that are particularly useful when working with multi-page statements. In addition, statements are cross-linked to invoices, so users can click on an invoice number listed within a statement and be instantly transferred to that invoice.
Figure 7: Sample customer invoice.
When using CloudStreet Portal, you can do more than view your statements and invoices. Users have access to the data within those documents. For example, clean copy and paste capabilities allow you to export selected data into office applications (e.g., Microsoft Office, Open Office), with appropriate column and row formatting.