New Invoice Submission Process Delivers Benefits to the Bruin Community

New Invoice Submission Process: Benefits to Campus

In early 2024, UCLA will launch BruinBuy Plus, a new procure-to-pay system that will bring immediate benefits to both vendors and the campus. The Ascend 2.0 program continues to work with campus to ensure that the implementation of these new systems meet the needs of UCLA, now and in the future. Michael Ruputz, Associate Director of Accounts Payable states, “As modernized systems and processes are integrated, staff is empowered with new tools to streamline workflows and to automate data processing and collecting. This allows them to invest more time on higher level functions such as analyzing data and forecasting for more streamlined operations.”

New Invoice Submission Process

The new invoice submission process provides a solution for improving outdated systems and processes for vendors, campus, and leadership alike in the following ways:

• Efficiency of vendor detail storage: Beginning mid-December 2023, purchase orders will be automatically sent to the email address attached to the vendor’s PaymentWorks account, UCLA’s vendor management tool. PaymentWorks provides UCLA with a more efficient method of gathering and storing vendor details and payment information. Vendors will then email invoices associated with a purchase order to a centralized email address. This differs from the current invoice submission process, in which vendors may submit invoices to UCLA via Transcepta or the Invoice Submission Portal.
• Time savings and increased accuracy: Once submitted, invoices are 'captured' using Digital Capture, an Optical Character Recognition program. This program will read the electronic image and then send the data to BruinBuy Plus. This eliminates the need to manually upload invoices, so that staff can spend their time focusing on more critical business functions. In addition, the automatic conversion of invoices reduces the risk of data entry errors from vendor invoices into the UCLA system.
• Greater transparency: The status of payments will be seen and shared instantly across approvers and Accounts Payable professionals. This will make it easier for staff to see how invoices affect and are applied against existing subcontracts. This transparency also enables timelier invoice review and approval, as well as supports a self-help option, for users to quickly pull the reports they need in tracking payments within the system.

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