Vendor Invoice Line Items

Vendor Invoice line items are generated directly from OCR Vendor Invoice Line Items. When an Extracted Vendor Invoice is processed, each line item is classified and assigned to a Service and/or a Vendor Fee.

Every vendor invoice MUST contain at least one Service or Extraneous charge Line Item in order to be considered a valid Vendor Invoice for auditing. Often times there will be many line items on an invoice with these being composed of individual service charges and the fees that go along with them. In Discovery, these are classified as follows:

Key Attributes

Each line item contains standard data points, such as description, unit price, quantity, and line total values. A line item also has the following unique values as part of its existence within Discovery:

• Type - See below
• Service (For Extraneous Charges, Commercial Service Charges, Rolloff per Haul Charges, and Rolloff per Ton Charges only). A Service Charge must be matched to a Service on the same Vendor Account as the Vendor Invoice before auditing can take place.
• Vendor Fee (for Extraneous Charges, Allocatable Fees, and Allocatable Service Fees only). An Allocatable Fee must always be matched to the corresponding Vendor Fee before auditing can take place. This will effect the auditing process.
• Category
• Amount/Price - The amount being billed by the hauler for the given line item.
• All in Cost (for Commercial Service Charges, Rolloff Per Ton Charges, Rolloff per Haul Charges, and Extraneous Charges only). The All in Cost of a Service charge is always its base amount/price + the sum total of any Allocated Values that were generated for it during the allocation process.

Line Item Types

A line item's type determines how it is used during the audit process. When an Extracted Invoice is processed, Discovery's trained machine learning will attempt to determine the Type of each line item based upon the its specific attributes, including text descriptions, quantity, unit price, and line total. Each line item must be one of the following types in order to proceed through the vendor invoice process:

RollOff per Haul Charge

This is a service charge line item that represents the cost for the hauler to drive out to a location and pickup/pull a Rolloff container. These line items will always be tied to a Rolloff Service Charge (SSL).

RollOff per Ton Charge - This is a service charge line item representing the amount of waste (tons) that was removed in Rolloff Container. As with the haul charges, these line items will always need to be tied to a Rolloff Service (SSL) in Discovery.

Commercial Service Charge - As the name suggests, this is a charge billed for a Commercial Service that was rendered. This will always be tied to a Commercial Service (SSL) in Discovery that you've set up for the vendor account the invoice is tied to. Commercial Service Charges are always audited against the corresponding Commercial Service that the charge has been matched to.

Extraneous Charge - This is a line item that's billed due to an unexpected cost such as a recycling contamination, an excess/overage fee, or even a delivery/setup charge. Extraneous charges must always be tied to a Service in Discovery.

Allocatable Fee - This is a fee whose value can be applied across the entire Vendor Invoice (such as a fuel fee, late payment charge, taxes, or admin fees). Allocatable Fees amounts are always allocated across charge line items and rolled into the All in Cost of the line item during the allocation process.

Allocatable Service Fee - These are similar to Allocatable Fees but they're applied to a specific service charge only. As an example, given an invoice with recycling Commercial Service Charge, a non-recycling Commercial Service Charge, and a recyclable material offset fee (RMO), we would want to make sure that the RMO is only applied to recycling service charges. In order to do this, we could set it as an Allocatable Service Fee using the Recycling Service Charge on the invoice.