Yokoy Invoice: IBAN & QR code recognition, supplier view redesign, and next approver – April 2023

Over the past few months, we‘ve been working on several improvements to reduce the time needed to close the books with Yokoy Invoice.

Yokoy now includes an AI-based method to prevent payments to the wrong supplier accounts. Yokoy recognizes if an IBAN is included in an invoice and automatically presents you with the available options when you want to select the payment account.

To make sure that you always make payments to the correct entity, Yokoy automatically cross-checks if the IBAN on the invoice matches the supplier‘s master payment account data. If they don‘t match, a warning flag appears.

QR codes are an easy way to store information. QR codes can also be found on Swiss invoices. You now have the option to extract relevant information from them. Information such as Payment reference and Account number. Yokoy extracts this during invoice extraction when a new invoice is uploaded.

What happens when a Yokoy user is out of office and cannot approve invoices? Yokoy allows users and HR to delegate other users to approve invoices on their behalf.

You can set this up through the User profile settings > Assistant & Delegate.

Vendors can have many different payment accounts to receive payments originating from invoicing. If you (the invoice payer) only have one payment account of your vendor set up in Yokoy, you could be sending payments to the incorrect vendor account or entity. The payment account information is now enriched and, according to each client’s ERP connection, you can now update payment account options per vendor.

In the Supplier view, the page has been redesigned by separating the supplier information into three tabs (General information, Invoices, Settings). You can now see the cost progress by Draft, In approval, In review, and Ready for export.

Supplier details view:

Settings view:

You can select the default payment terms for the supplier in the Supplier page. When an invoice of that supplier comes in, the default payment term of that supplier is pre-selected automatically. Standard is the default payment term. However, companies can have different payment terms for different invoices. In this update, payment terms can be set up on a legal entity level and consequently manually selected per invoice.

You can now see where a submitted invoice is currently being processed and who will be the next person to approve it.

You can do so by going to the Approvers tab of the specific invoice.

Whenever an invoice goes through the approval process, various stakeholders can adjust it. When an adjustment is made, the next person in the approval flow must be made aware that an adjustment has been made.

With this update, Yokoy adds a flag to each adjusted invoice as it moves through a company's approval process. This ensures more transparency throughout the whole approval flow.

Suppliers may send invoices to the wrong entity. Therefore, you can now move invoices from one legal entity to another.

In Invoice Processor > Invoices, select one or more invoices that you want to move to another legal entity. Then click the three dots on the top right corner and select Move (n of invoices) across legal entity.

Yokoy asks you to select the legal entity to move the invoices to. Once you click confirm, the invoices are removed from the current legal entity and moved to the chosen legal entity.

It is now possible to sort invoice tables columns by supplier name, invoice due date, invoice date, upload date, submitter, and total claim.

You can sort tables across the invoice module including the following views: invoice processor view, manager approval view, submitter invoice view and export view.

Simply click on the arrow on the top of the column label to sort the table by this value.

You can now aggregate invoice line items on an invoice, supplier or company level by tax rate. This means Yokoy automatically clusters and subtotals the line items of the invoice by the tax rate, giving you a simplified overview of your invoice line items.

On an invoice level, bulk select the invoice line items, then click Aggregate line items.

On the supplier level, go to Invoice Processor > Supplier and select a supplier. Under Default settings, click Use simplified line item for this supplier.

On the company level, go to Admin > Invoice settings and select Use simplified line items for legal entity.

Any approved submitter is now able to upload invoices and add details to them within Yokoy. Submitters can upload invoices by clicking the invoice icon on the far left in their Submitter view. They can then fill in any outstanding information if necessary and submit the invoice to finance.

If you do not want Submitters to be able to upload invoices, you can turn this off by going to Admin > Invoice settings and select Prevent Submitters to upload invoices.

The uploaded invoices can then be found in two places, in the Submitter view in the Invoice tab or in the Invoice section.

Often, the Submitter uploading an invoice is not necessarily the person who should fill in additional details about the invoice. Finance users often need a centralized way to gather more information about invoices from departments. Now both Submitters and Finance users benefit from being able to update the user assigned to an invoice. They can do this by opening the invoice and selecting a new Submitter from the dropdown list.

Since invoices can be uploaded by different users or submitted by email, you can now see how invoices were uploaded in the invoice view.

Yokoy Invoice can now manage credit notes. Credit notes are typically used when there has been an error in an already-issued invoice, such as an incorrect amount, or when a customer wishes to change their original order.

Once the credit note is uploaded to the invoice, click on the invoice and in the top right corner select the Credit note checkbox. Then all line items automatically turn negative and entered values are negative. When you return to the invoice inbox processor, you can also filter for credit notes documents.

A minor adjustment has taken place for defining a credit note. As shown in the graphic, an entry can be converted into a credit note by clicking on the three dots on the right side of the page. A credit note is deemed as such when the amount on the document is negative.

You can now edit the total gross amount of an invoice directly in Yokoy Invoice. Previously, you could only edit the value of the line items. Since both the total gross amount and the line items are editable, a warning appears to notify you if there is a mismatch.

You can now enable an invoice service date field in Yokoy Invoice. This is a legally required attribute on invoices issued in several European countries and is filled in manually by users.

To activate this feature, go to Admin > Supplier Invoices and select Enable Service Date.

Some companies do not want managers to edit any details on invoices. Instead, managers should just review and approve the invoice. Admins can now disable managers from editing invoice details by going to Admin > Supplier Invoices and selecting Managers are not able to edit invoices.

You now have an option to display the number of attachments as well as the number of related invoices. This way, you have a better overview to make quicker decisions.

You can now split PDFs with Yokoy Invoice and define exactly how many PDFs should be created and which pages to include. This is particularly useful where manually scanning invoices. Up to this update, you had to scan each invoice individually. Now you can scan once and consequently split digitally.

In the Yokoy Invoice, select the Split button on the relevant invoice page, as shown below:

Next, choose how many pages to split the document into. You can indicate this in the field “Invoice” by inserting how many pages you would like to extract in order to create a new invoice from the original one. By clicking the button “+ Add Invoice” you can create multiple invoices from the original one, selecting a certain quantity of pages. You can select pages using a comma (e.g. 1,2) or using a dash (e.g 1-2).

After this, Yokoy will split the original invoice, which you will be able to find in the general Invoice Processor view (highlighted in red):

Finance users can now create and export reports via Finance > Analytics.

You can select a range of filter criteria, such as invoices that are specific to certain employees, date ranges, specific cost objects, etc. You can find the list of all the data fields for filtering below. Consequently, you can choose which data fields you want to export. Once you select the necessary fields, you can save them in a template by clicking Save As New Template. You can give a name to the template as well.

By clicking Apply Template, you can use your template later on.