Vendor Contract Fees
What is a Vendor Contract Fee?
In Discovery, Vendor Contract Fees allow you to systematically apply restrictions to the fees that may appear on the Vendor Invoices you process and audit each month. This requires that your Tenant is using Discovery's Gather, Extract, and Audit technologies.
Vendor Contract Fees represent the rate structure for charges that may be audited against a corresponding Vendor Contract. When auditing, these fees are audited against Allocatable Fees that that are billed on a Vendor Invoice. They may be overridden by a Vendor Service Fee, which represents a Vendor Fee rate structure for a specific Service.
How does this work?
When auditing a Vendor Invoice, Discovery will classify and associate the Allocatable Fees on that invoice to the Vendor Contract Fees defined on the Vendor Contract for the Vendor Invoice. Once this is done, Discovery will spin through each fee on the Vendor Contract and check that the billed amount is indeed within the allowed tolerance levels. When a billing error is discovered a revision will automatically be generated for the given Vendor Invoice Line Item.
How do vendor contract fees apply to client invoices?
Vendor Contract Fees often represent extra or non-service charges that appear on vendor invoices (for example: contamination, overage, fuel, environmental fees, etc.).
In Discovery, when these vendor invoice charges are categorized as extraneous charges, they generate billable expenses, which means they can be billed through to the client as client line items.
With Client Rate Markups on Vendor Contract Fees, you can now set the client charge ahead of time, so Discovery automatically applies the correct client markup when the vendor invoice is processed.
How do I?
Anatomy of a Vendor Contract Fee
Vendor Fee
This is the base "template" used to describe the fee you're creating. It's essential that the value here align with the type of fee you're trying to represent on your contract.
The list of available Vendor Fees supported by Discover may be found here.
The Vendor Fee defined for a given Vendor Contract Fee is what allows it to be audited against a Vendor Invoice Line Item during the Vendor Invoice Auditing process.
Restriction
A Vendor Contract Fee inherently restricts the allowable charges agreed to on a Vendor Contract. Because of this, each fee you add to a vendor contract must always have a restriction defined for it. These restrictions can be broken down as follows:
- Not Allowed: This restriction allows you to completely strike a fee charge from a Vendor Invoice (the line item will be automatically reduced to $0).
- Uncapped: Use this restriction if you have an Allocatable Fee that is allowed (per the Vendor Contract) but does not have a defined limit on the billed amount. A Vendor Invoice Line Item that matches to an a fee with this restriction will always be audited at its face-value, and no adjustment will be made.
- Capped per Occurrence: Use this restriction to cap a fee to a specific amount per invoice. During the Vendor Invoice auditing process, fees with this restriction applied to them will not be allowed to exceed the amount defined on this fee.
- Capped per Unit: This restriction allows you to cap an Allocatable Fee to a specific amount per unit (based upon the Vendor Invoice Line Item quantity of the Allocatable Fee). During the Vendor Invoice auditing process, Allocatable Fees with this restriction applied to them will not be allowed to have a unit cost that exceeds amount defined on this fee.
- Capped Percentage of Service Charges: Use this restriction to cap a fee to a specific percentage of the invoice's service charges. During the Vendor Invoice auditing process, fees with this restriction applied to them will not be allowed to exceed the defined percentage of the invoice's service charges.
Client Markup Type (Requires Revenue Tier)
- Per Occurrence: This markup type allows you to set a fixed dollar amount that will be billed to the client each time this fee appears on a vendor invoice. The client is charged this amount per occurrence of the fee.
- Per Unit: This markup type allows you to set a fixed dollar amount per unit that will be billed to the client when this fee appears on a vendor invoice. The total client charge is calculated by multiplying this rate by the quantity of units specified in the vendor invoice line item.
- Percentage (%) of all in line item rate: This markup type allows you to set a percentage that will be calculated based on the total service charges when this fee appears on a vendor invoice. The client is charged this percentage of the all-in line item rates for the applicable service charges.
Description Override
Use this field to enter a custom description for client line items that are generated from each vendor contract fee.
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