Steve,
Seems like there are a couple of issues: 1) If electronic business records are accepted by the court's of your jurisdiction then the electronic "record" should not be a problem; 2) the electronic copy would be the best copy available to your company for litigation; 3) If there is a problem, the supplier should have their own original copy of the invoice.  That said, you should have a QC process in place that would assure the new electronic record data is consistent with the hard-copy input invoice.  One caveat is, if you are a contractor for the federal government then you need to keep the hard copy of the invoice (if such exists)  for one (1) year for audit inspection.

Since your company is asking for or is willing to receive electronic invoices I don't see the difference between that and the converted invoice.  It seems that it might be worthwhile to do a cost/benefit analysis of the "conversion" process and system v. imaging.  It would seem to me that imaging the vendor invoice avoids data entry mistakes that will come from invoice "conversion".  From the little I know about your proposed process it would seem to me that it has similar components to an imaging program and the costs may be the same.

You should talk to corporate counsel and your audit folks about this to protect yourself and the company.  Dick King, University of Arizona

________________________________________
From: Records Management Program [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Stephen Smith [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 7:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] Business Process Question - Purchase Orders and Invoices

Colleagues:

I have a question regarding a business process and I was hoping to find out if there are any laws or cases (aside from RM best practice) that could impact some of the decisions being considered.

The scenario centers around the way we process purchase order and invoices.  We are switching to a new solution from on old Notes database workflow.  We generate purchase orders for, conveniently enough, all of the products we order.  Those P.O.s are issued and then we receive an invoice from the vendor.  The proposed new system includes something I am objecting to and that is when an original invoice is received, the new system will convert the P.O. to an electronic invoice and that is retained.  The original invoice received from the vendor is kept for a month and then destroyed and the converted invoice from the P.O. is now magically the official record.

Thanks, Steve

Stephen A. Smith, MLIS, CRM, CIP, CDIA+
Manager, Corporate Records
QVC, Inc.  Compliance

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