Pivot Payables: Maximizing Value for Commercial Cards, Client Billing, and ERP Integration

Cher Pearsall, CEO

Pivot Payables is a leading SAP Concur partner. This article presents three products specifically designed to automate critical processes associated with Concur Expense and Concur Invoice.

Let’s start with arguably the largest Accounts Payable challenge faced by most companies today: Credit card accounting and reconciliation.

Pivot’s newest offering is PivotEQ, and it helps maximize the value of commercial card programs. The 2024 product roadmap includes exciting new features; however, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The current critical feature set of PivotEQ focuses on credit card accounting and reconciliation–let’s explain the main problem areas and how PivotEQ addresses each.

For perspective, consider a company with 100 cardholders. Each month, the finance administrator receives a credit card statement with all the transactions of those cardholders. The administrator’s primary responsibility is to ensure accurate accounting for all the transactions on the statement.

Unsubmitted Expense Reports Result in Less Precise Financial Reporting

Ideally, all transactions come through on expense reports before the card statement due date. In reality, it’s common that 50 percent or more are not submitted by the deadline. Each month, when the bill is paid, the administrator creates accounting for the unsubmitted expense transactions. Let’s say each cardholder has 10 transactions, and 50 percent are outstanding at month end–that’s 500 unmatched transactions that need accrual accounting. Manually creating 500 accrual entries is a daunting task, so most administrators total them up and create a single accrual entry instead. While it offsets the amount, it does not provide useful accounting in their ERP and can create material anomalies in financial reporting.

Identifying what expenses are, and are not, submitted Administrators work hard to do everything they can to reduce the number of unmatched transactions–so that they can, in turn, decrease the time required to create month end accounting and ensure accurate financial reporting. The first step to reducing the number of unmatched transactions is to know which transactions have been submitted on an expense report and which have not. Doing so is a manual process of comparing the transactions on the card statement with transactions on expense reports, noting those that are submitted, and identifying those that remain unmatched between the card statement and the expense reports submitted. Of course, expense reports are submitted every day by cardholders, so this manual process is repeated several times each month. The outcome is to determine a list of unmatched transactions, by cardholder.

Getting Cardholders to Submit Expense Reports for Unmatched Transactions Once again, administrators go to great effort to close the gap of unmatched transactions.

The administrator emails each cardholder requesting they submit an expense report, often pasting the unmatched transactions into the message. They send follow-up emails as the month progresses, make phone calls, and if in-office, may even visit personally.