How Leveraging Field Data Accelerates Public Sector Pay Apps & Invoice Processing

As the complexities of municipal projects increase, the inefficient legacy systems they rely on cannot provide the transparency, visibility or real-time data needed. This poses ungainly financial risk in the form of stalled payments.

To address this failure, managers must employ digital solutions that accelerate and standardize the process. This allows them to course-correct toward robust financial stewardship of taxpayer projects. 

Here are four steps to take when making that transition.

Step 1: Establish a digital mandate and standardize it.

The ability to track costs down to the penny is not just good business, it is necessary in navigating the high regulatory burden required by federal funders. For it to work everyone must be on board. 

• Establish regulated digital tool use. Require the use of digital financial tools within the agency and apps in the field that aggregate real-time data and communicate to expedite invoice processing.
• Leverage executive support. Work with leadership to enforce the new digital workflow, pursuade skeptics and support learning curves. 
• Get granular. Take the time to create a cost-coding structure that gets as granular as needed to track key variables required for reimbursement and auditing. 

Step 2: Make in-the-field reconciliation a core practice.

Cobbling data together weeks after the pay period ends slows processing. Using real-time apps for tracking in the field eliminates delays and promotes a real-time verifiable source of truth between inspectors and contractors. 

Verify quantities daily. Have inspectors and contractors work independently to log data and photograph the work completed and quantities installed each day. Then, make reconciliation immediate and collaborative by having both parties agree on the data before signing off.

Step 3: Harness the speed of automated invoices.

Data that’s clean and quantifiable can flow directly into the agency's tools, streamlining the month-end process and making it audit-ready in a matter of days. This is the big step agencies can take to avoid late payment penalties. 

• Integrate tools in the field and office. Making sure that the data flows correctly from the field to the office allows change orders and events to be managed easier and quicker.
• Find and utilize productive features: Investigate what a digitized system can take off your plate, like invoice drafting or pre-reconciled items.
• Have contractors submit immediately. Real-time data means each contractor can submit a highly accurate and audit-ready invoice within days of the billing cycle’s close. 

Step 4: Improve internal processing and audit readiness.

Support similar standardization and acceleration for payments. Transparent, verifiable and centralized data shared between parties reduces the time it takes to process an invoice. 

• Streamline internal reviews. An invoice backed by a daily time stamp and photo documentation reduces the need for requests for information (RFIs) in disputes.
• Focus on accounting When internal teams aren’t verifying field work, they can focus on swifter accounting checks and funding allocations.
• Have audit-ready information at your fingertips. A single source of truth with records of performed work, verified quantities, and photo documentation is a digital-trail ready for internal or external audits.  

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Accelerating the Process

Agencies can immediately eliminate costly lags between work completed and funds paid by implementing these steps to decrease submission aggregates exponentially.

They allow for optimization, acceleration and standardization of the process, resulting in a centralized data pool that acts as a single source of truth to drive overall project and portfolio success.

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