• Product Reviews
• 02.12.2021 05:01 pm

What does FourQ’s Paymaster do?

Paymaster from FourQ  is a robust billing and invoicing solution that automates and centralizes global invoice management processes, from invoice receipt and qualification through to validation and approval. The solution also promotes international tax compliance through system transparency and ensures companies do not pay more than they owe. It processes invoices at the lowest level of detail, increasing tax accuracy, and guaranteeing accurate, on-time payment.

Paymaster allows companies to:

• Automate manual AR/AP processes to increase productivity, improve accuracy, and reduce costs.

• Eliminate late fees, penalties, and past-due invoices with on-time vendor payments.

• Achieve balance sheet compliance and transparency.

Who needs Paymaster?

Any multinational company with complex supply chains and centralized service models needs Paymaster. Companies who can immediately benefit from Paymaster experience complexities that include:

• Cross-border tax compliance

• Indirect tax (e.g. VAT, GST, etc.) recovery

• Diverse ERP landscapes

• Manual payment processes

• Currency & FX restrictions

• Ever-changing regulatory environment

What's special about it?

Paymaster streamlines and automates the invoicing process to benefit both businesses and vendors.

Vendors benefit from:

• Consolidated payments

• 90% reduction in aged receivables

• Single point of contact for collections

• No misapplied or missing payments

• 100% tax compliance

• Effective dispute management

• Online issue / query resolution

• Competitive pricing/ offering

Businesses benefit from:

• Centralized and automated invoice processing

• Rate, inventory & usage accuracy

• Contractual service credits & rebates applied

• Tax accuracy and recovery in 100+ countries

• Financial statement accuracy and compliance

• Supports statutory & tax audits

• Documents in the cloud

• Decision-making supported by analytics

What features are relevant?

Paymaster, the full-service solution for centralizing and automating global vendor invoice management, includes features that deliver:

• Automated processes: A series of automated features saves time and increases team productivity in the process. The solution has systematic accounts receivable capabilities to streamline and simplify how invoices are processed. Payments to global vendors and other service providers can be scheduled in order to keep an operation’s supply chains running smoothly.

• Compliance: The solution provides a robust compliance toolkit that affords total system transparency. Organizational visibility helps reduce the number of fines and fees that are associated with non-compliance.

• Accurate taxes: Paymaster promotes accurate tax filing, which mitigates the amount of tax leakage that an organization encounters. Inaccurate tax calculations can cost an organization a significant amount of money with unforeseen fees, which is why the solution takes measures to ensure accurate tax calculation and validation. These measures also save time by reducing the hours one would need to spend adjusting both over and underpayments on taxes.

• Aged payables: This solution helps collect fees on unpaid invoices to prevent future late payments. It stops payables from piling up to maintain a steady stream of income for the business.

• International commerce support: The solution supports global business growth by allowing for companies to run and do business on the international stage. The solution comes with tools to provide receipts, validate requests, and perform comprehensive system audits. It helps navigate users through the complicated process of expanding services across the globe.

• Testing: Make the most out of Paymaster through robust feature testing capabilities. Optimize efficiency by creating and testing automated processes. Configure tailored reports to get the precise information needed for the job at hand.

Paymaster has recently added new features and capabilities to help multinational corporations better consolidate accounts payable in a world of large and increasingly complex invoices. They include:

• New invoice audit engine which provides a detailed audit trail of each invoice’s life cycle along with a visualization of the invoice’s creation to completed payment.

• New approval engine which shows the chain of the approval process, including a mass approval feature. This enables users to access specific invoice details in PDF format whenever additional insight is required to facilitate the approval process or to speed decision-making.

• Full spend analytics and invoice line-item details can be quickly accessed.

Who are some competitors?

Most companies rely on their ERP solutions such as SAP and Oracle to help manage their global invoice management process. However, these systems are not built to handle holistic tax and legal consequences and have great difficulty tracking the transaction of services. They are also not end-to-end solutions, and don’t consider all the process steps required to complete a transaction. Customizations of these ERPs are expensive, lengthy, and need regular updates which sometimes require the customizations to be reimplemented.

Other solutions/companies in the space offer one or some of the functions critical to managing intercompany vendor invoices. They can offer expense management, but they're not managing accounting allocation. They offer accounting allocation, but they don't have the centralization of invoicing and payments. 

What is a real case example?

With a market cap of $200 billion, a multinational company operating nine business units acrossv 170+ countries faced significant bill payment challenges. Each of the corporation’s businesses secured their own IT contracts with vendors, which made total enterprise IT spend far higher than if it was centrally negotiated for all business units. Broadening its focus from corporate security and overhead administration, the multinational’s shared services team began determining how it could reduce IT costs and eliminate inefficiencies by automating the bill payment process.

The introduction of the FourQ’s methodology and Paymaster helped the multinational client significantly reduce operating costs and improve the efficiency of its bill payment process. It moved 75-85% of IT and telecom transactions, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, onto the platform. This helped the corporation:

• Identify $22M of invoice errors from a service provider in year one of relationship

• Negotiate vastly improved terms with its vendors

• Avoid tax leakage as well as fees and penalties related to delayed payments

• Increase the accuracy and timeliness of financial reporting

• Implement a new and timely set of vendor analytics with centralized data to support decision making

• Streamline the accounting process to make accurate comparisons quickly and gain sourcing leverage through competitive bidding processes.