ELECTRONIC INVOICING The National Business Center (NBC) is a service-bureau under the Office of the Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior (DOI). The NBC is in the business of acquiring, implementing and operationally supporting Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) federal administrative software (particularly finance and procurement) for the DOI bureaus and other federal client agencies. The nBC is requesting information from vendors in the Washington, D. C. metropolitan area that have developed or are in the process of developing electronic invoice processing software which can be used to front-end federal agency payment processing systems. Background: The NBC clients include a variety of federal agencies and bureaus. The NBC clients use the Federal Financial System (FFS) and Procurement Desktop (PD) developed by American Management Systems (AMS) as their payment processing system and procurement system, respectively. The NBC has been testing Allaire Corporation's ColdFusion product as a possible tool to develop a web-based method for vendor invoice submission and foresees the need for multiple invoice submission methods (batch), and possibly Xtensible Markup Language (XML) submission format. The NBC and its clients use IBM-MVS/VSAM for FFS and Oracle for PD. The Invoice-21 application will reside on NBC's MS-NT Server to be accessed by its clients. The translation software may need to translate a variety of incoming invoice formats, as in the case of Electronic Data Interchange (ED). Internet e-mail and/or EDI is/are possible option(s) for invoice receipt acknowledgements. The processing steps for particular invoice types differ are are independent upon individual client agency business rules and/or regulations. Settings for these rules and/or regulations will be variable for individual client customization. The invoice processing software will be used to process invoices for multiple client agencies and forwarded to each respective agenchy system for payment. It is anticipated that the system will be provide agency users with a Web-based user context. Funtional Requirements Overview: Electronic invoicing will include, but is not limited to, the following transactions: Receive invoice files in a variety of formats (e.g. Web, EDI, XML, etc.) from a variety of vendors (commercial and government) by various methods (e.g. web interface, file transfer protocol, electronic mailbox, etc). Transmit receipt of acknowledgement(s) and/or failure notification(s) to the submitting vendor. Archive invoice file(s) into readable format(s) to construct receiving report(s), payment authorization(s), etc. Transmit failure notification(s) to the vendor if invoice file(s) received is/are corrupt, unreadable upon translation, or do not contain the required data elements necessary to process the invoice(s)(wait for receipt of re-submitted invoice file(s)). Manually review all invoices lines in the file to certify that the good(s) and/or service(s) has/have been received and/or rendered (receiving official responsibility). a. When the receiving official certifies all line in a corrected**invoice file, these changes will be modified in the original invoice file that was stored in the Invoice-21 database to be used as the certified invoice file from which a payment voucher document will be created. Complete and transmit a remittance and/or non-remittance document to the vendor confirming invoice line(s) certified and/or not certified for payment with reason code(s)(receiving official responsibility). If all line in the invoice file are certified for payment by the receiving official (i.e., only a remittance document is transmitted back to the vendor), the system will date stamp the invoice file (inititates the 30-day prompt payment cycle). a. Go to step 10. If not all lines in the invoice file are certified for payment by the receiving official (i.e., a non-remittance document is transmitted to the vendor), then the invoice file is stored in the NBC's Invoice-21 database to be retrieved and/or modified upon the receipt of a corrected**invoice file from the vendor. a. Repeat steps 1 through 8. Store the certified invoice file in the NBC's Invoice-21 database for audit purposes. Map the data elements contained in the certified invoice file to a payment voucher document; and Upload the payment voucher document into the client's payment processing system with a document status of "held". At this point, the client's payment processing system will be in control of the payment voucher. **The corrected invoice file will contain only those invoice line(s) non-remitted by the receiving official, along with the reason code(s) entered by the vendor either approving or disapproving them for non-payment. Note: The NBC plans to develop and implement its first phase of electronic invoicing as a pilot project for the United States Geological Survey( USGS) located in Reston, VA. This project will include receiving, certifying and creating payment vouchers for Federal Express billings. A draft flowchart developed for Federal Express ANSI X 12 EDI transaction sets 110, 820 and 997 is available and will be provided upon request. You can access the Federal Express EDI Implementation Guide (standard format) at http://www.fedex.com/us/software/eshipping/ediinvoicing.html. For general project information, please access our web site at http://www.nbc.gov/ec21. For technical and functional information, please contact Jo Ann Blando on (703) 648-4171 or by e-mail at 'JoAnn_J_Blando@nbc.gov. Posted 02/23/00 (W-SN427919).

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