Finance questions - Freedom of information requests

Finance questions

537

27/05/2022

FOI

Hi – hope you are well. Please can I raise an FOI for a response to the following questions around expense and invoice, thanks.Expenses1. What finance system do you use?2. What system do you use to manage and process your staff's expenses?
3. What is the expense process?
4. How many expense claims were made in FY21? And what was total value of expense claimed in FY21?
5. Can you submit expenses remotely?
6. How are you claiming VAT on mileage? Do your staff have to deduct commute from mileage?
7. What percentage of expense claims are you auditing?
8. How many FTEs (full time employees) do you have processing expense claims?
9. What is the average time to reimburse your staff's expenses?
10. How are you reporting on expense spend, PSA expense types and scope 3 emissions reporting?
Invoices
1. What system do you use for managing/processing invoices?
2. What is your current invoice process for handling supplier invoices, from receipt to when it is posted in the ERP/finance system and ready for payment?
3. How many invoices were processed in FY21?
4. How many FTEs (full time employees) do you have in your accounts payable team who process invoices?
5. What percentage of invoices were paid late in FY21?
6. Do you use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan invoices?
7. Do you have to manually validate the scanned invoices from the OCR capture?
8. Do you currently have a PO system or a non-PO system? If you use both types – what is the percentage of PO invoices vs. non-PO invoices?
9. Are you claiming VAT on invoices? If so, are you doing this in-house?
10. How are you currently reporting on invoice spend?

Expenses HR Payroll and IT
1. Unit 4 – Business World
2. Unit 4 – Business World
3. For the majority of staff this is claimed via an online form within Business World Self Service, this is authorised by the line manager prior to automated processing of the payment within the next available payroll run. For those that submit on a paper claim this is also authorised by the line manager prior so submission to the payroll team who then transfer the information from the paper claim to the payroll system for processing. Fr the definition of expenses this will also include claims for business mileage.
4. 5,720 claim submitted and the total value paid in expenses £545,384.17
5. Yes via Self Service
6. Where the claim is supported by a valid VAT receipt the appropriate amount of VAT is claimed.
Yes our our staff have to deduct commute from mileage?
7. All are verified by the line manager prior to authorising for payment.
8. We have 0.50 fte involved in the processing of hard copy claims, all other claims are processed and approved via the online system with no additional resource.
9. The average duration to process a hard copy claim is 4 minutes.
10. Reported via P11D

Invoices –
1. Proactis Invoice Capture is used for invoice validation and invoices are processed for payment using the Unit 4 Business World ERP system
2. We use a 3 way matching process: Invoice received: 1) Matched to Purchase Order – 2) Checked for Goods Receipt – 3) Invoice Paid
3. 83,637 invoices were processed between 01/04/2021 – 31/03/2022
4. There are 5 FTE's in the team that carry out multiple duties, part of which is invoice processing
5. During the period from 01/04/2021 – 31/03/2022 6% of invoices were paid late
6. OCR is used to scan invoices
7. Some manual validation is carried out
8. The Council operates a PO system
9. There is a dedicated in-house team that calculates VAT and submits the appropriate returns
10. Invoice spend is reported using reports within our ERP system