Requestor Name on the PO 2807
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If you have an administrator who requests Purchase Orders for a group of people, should the administrator be putting their name as the requester or the person who actually requested the goods or services? The invoice for the Purchase Order will later be sent to whomever is listed as the requester.
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That depends on your process for verifying and processing vendor invoices.
How does the vendor know to which person in the organization it should send the invoice? If somebody else in the organization (e.g. the accounts payable department) receives the invoice how do they know whom to contact if they have any questions or need to verify that a service was actually received? Do you post goods receipts and service receipts in your ERP system so that that the ERP system can automatically check whether the quantity on the invoice corresponds to a received quantity that has not been invoiced yet and that the unit price on the invoice corresponds to the unit price 'n the purchase order?
It all depends on the process.
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The vendor sends the invoice to Accounts Payable, and AP then forwards the invoice to the original requester on the matching Purchase Order for confirmation of receipt of goods or services and approval. This process works fine when the requester was the person who both requested and received the goods/services.
However, since in this case the administrator put in their own name rather than the real requester, the invoice never touches the hands of the person who actually requested the goods or services and the invoice goes to the administrator who submitted the Purchase Order for them.
At this point the administrator should contact the original requester to check that everything was received ok, but since this would be done manually there is no way to confirm or really track that they did this. When they sign off the invoice for approval for payment it is assumed they did this intermediary step but it’s not recorded anywhere that they did.
Is this still SOX-ok, or is it important to get the confirmation from the REAL requester that the goods or services were received and in expected condition/etc? Is it too ‘sketchy’ to rely on this administrator to manually check at their own will?