In some cases, customers will have multiple accruals for the same job, same vendor, and same charge code--what we call "repeated accruals". There are two known bugs in CargoWise that can sometimes cause problems when posting invoices in these cases:
- CargoWise will arbitrarily match posted invoices against accruals.
- After posting the first invoice, CargoWise will combine the remaining amounts into a single accrual, and zero out any others.
Our solution to these bugs is the Withheld Invoices tab.
Withheld Invoices
Withheld Invoices are invoices that have been approved but are waiting for the remaining repeated accruals to be covered by other invoices prior to transmission to CargoWise. For instance, if there are five separate accruals for delivery charges, BravoTran will wait to transmit these to CargoWise until the all the accruals have been used up. Once the last invoice has been processed, they will all be transmitted together to CargoWise.
In most cases of repeated accruals, all invoices for a given job will be sent by the vendor within a relatively short period, usually 1-2 days, so this withholding has minimal impact on your forwarding operations.
This solves bug 2 above. However, BravoTran can't prevent bug 1, where CargoWise arbitrarily matches invoices to accruals. Instead, BravoTran transmits an additional document that explains how invoices were posted against specific accruals. In particular, operators can enter invoice-specific references (usually container numbers) in the Supplier Cost Reference field in CargoWise, and BravoTran will clearly mark how those were posted against when the invoices are transmitted to CargoWise.
Note: These additional references in the Supplier Cost Reference field also allow for improved BravoTran automation, as they eliminate any potential ambiguity about which invoices matches to which accrual.
At any time, you can see information on “Withheld Invoices” by navigating to the screen on the Dashboard, and you have the option of immediately transmitting the invoices to CargoWise by clicking “Transmit Now.” The disadvantage of this is that it will typically cause accruals to be rolled up unhelpfully, as per bug 2 above.
Most of the time, Withheld Invoices should just work. We recommend checking that tab periodically and making sure no invoices are Withheld for more than a few weeks. However, if this is an unacceptable solution, there is another alternative.
Numbered charge codes
Because the bugs mentioned above are specific to cases where the vendor, job, and charge code are all the same across multiple accruals, another solution is to simply use different numbered charge codes for different accruals. For instance, rather than using a single DEL charge code for deliveries, customers can implement multiple instances: DEL1, DEL2, DEL3, and so on.
This solution completely resolves both bugs mentioned above, with the drawback of proliferating charge codes. However, depending on how your team is accruing, there are often only a few specific charge codes that need to be numbered in this way, making this simpler to implement.