What is Costpoint Source to Pay and How Does Costpoint 8 Enhance the Source to Pay Process?

Source-to-Pay (S2P) is a process that begins with sourcing or seeking out, a supplier of goods or subcontractor of services, negotiating and ultimately contracting with them. The process ends in final payment to the contracted supplier with actionable reporting of data metrics such as supplier score carding and spend analytics.

Sourcing can make or break the successful delivery of your project. As the saying goes, procurement’s goal is to buy the right product or service from the best supplier at the best price. For government contractors, contractual requirements often specify supplier and subcontractor candidate criteria. For example, it may be mandatory to use a subcontractor with a specific socioeconomic status such as veteran-owned, small business, 8a, or woman-owned.

Costpoint helps government contractors with sourcing through the integration with GovWin IQ. In addition to importing the SAM.gov opportunity information from Deltek’s GovWin IQ , Costpoint 8 enhances the Source-to-Pay process by doubling the information flow, pulling in both opportunities and vendors, including vendor details such as NAICS and Cage codes and their socioeconomic status.

Additionally, it is crucial to ensure your subcontractors are not on the government's SAM.gov Exclusion List. This is imperative as not thoroughly vetting your subcontractors may lead to costly penalties (more details can be found in parts 9 and 52 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)).  The enhanced integration with GovWin IQ imports information when a vendor is on the denied party/exclusion list directly into Costpoint. Costpoint 8 will alert you with a banner in the vendor record as well as a warning on the Purchase Order if the supplier or subcontractor is on the Exclusion List, providing you the internal control, to avoid using an excluded subcontractor, thereby helping you protect your customer from “unscrupulous contractors” and your company from related penalties.

For awarded contracts, within Contract Management today, you can convert the opportunities to contracts, flow the data to subcontracts with suppliers, and create new projects.  You can record Organizational Conflicts of Interest, flow down FAR/DFAR clauses to your suppliers and subcontractors, and have the ability to track supplier performance.  With the release of Costpoint 8, the integration between the Contract Management and Planning modules will move to a new level of automation, expanding on the flow of data through the applications. This tighter integration, allows you to initiate a New Business Budget in Planning from the Opportunity in Contract Management.  You can also use the advanced search capabilities for vendors and vendor employees based on various skills requirements and assign those resources to the opportunity.

The integration between Contract Management and Planning is bi-directional, meaning changes made to related records will pass back and forth, streamlining data and improving efficiency by reducing the need for double-entry along with minimizing input errors and jumpstarting the budgeting process.

Continuing the streamlining of project data across modules and maximizing efficiency, we have added integration between Contract Management and Procurement in Costpoint 8. This tighter integration takes place in the Subcontracts application of Contract Management, where you can link the opportunities, contracts, and projects together. Now, along with the new purchase requisition (PR) and purchase order (PO) initiation capabilities in Manage Subcontracts, there are new integration points between the PR and PO applications and the subcontract record.  This integration improves efficiency and flows the project information throughout all of the applications, minimizing the need for duplicate data entry and accelerating the process, from Contract Management to Planning to Subcontracts to Procurement.

Costpoint 8 further enhances the source to pay process by expanding the  Supplier Portal collaboration capability. In addition to streamlining communication and transactions involving purchase orders, for parts and goods, you can now manage shipping information to see the status of a shipment against a PO, allowing buyers and planners to evaluate the timing effect on project status, requirements, and manufacturing process. 

The Supplier Portal will also have Invoice Management capabilities in Costpoint 8, helping you reduce procurement cycle times by bringing more automation, accuracy, and acceleration to the invoicing process for you and your suppliers and subcontractors. When you automate the generation and approval of invoices between your Accounts Payable team and Suppliers and Subcontractors, you bring more control to the timing of invoice payments, improve first-time match rate and reduce Days Payable Outstanding, which ultimately allows you to take advantage of early payment discounts.

To make the payment process even more efficient, you can make invoice transactions legally binding - even without the physical signed copies, using the new, innovative digital signature technologies in Costpoint Supplier Portal. If you and your supplier are set up for digital signatures, both parties will approve the invoice by signing the document with a FIDO compatible device.  The technology provides additional assurance and accuracy for both parties during the agreement process.

Rounding out the Source to Pay process, evaluate procurement metrics to gain insights into your processes to improve buyer performance with the new dynamic Procurement dashboard in Costpoint 8. The powerful filters provide deep dives into projects, organizations, specific date ranges, and more.

By digitalizing and streamlining the data flow while ensuring reporting accuracy and maintaining compliance standards, Costpoint 8 helps you meet your source to pay objectives of reducing cycle times and reducing costs and improving efficiency so your teams have more time to focus strategic initiatives and winning new business.

Be sure to register for Deltek’s Virtual Insight 2020 to learn more about what’s to come!

Here are a few ways to get the latest Costpoint 8 news:

• Costpoint Townhalls
• Deltek Virtual Insight 2020
• Deltek Learning Zone
• The Costpoint Product Blog