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PK has been providing end-to-end bill payment services to Fortune 1000 companies since 2009. Today, we process more than 240,000 invoices across 210 customers through our Energy Management Solutions (EMS) Expense and Data Management offering. By supporting payment, native and reporting currency, the PK solution can help you pay vendors in multiple currencies across more than 38 countries.

Full bill payment involves:

• Bill receipt and scanning including missing bill research
• Bill data capture, audit and validation, and exception management
• Bill staging for customer funds receipt, including treasury management
• Bill funding workflows
• Payment workflows and general ledger data exchange mechanisms
• Reconciliation and reporting

EMS is workflow-based, scalable, robust and SSAE 16 certified compliance. We can handle a variety of emergency situations, with ad hoc workflows able to accommodate bills for new accounts or accounts not in the system. Our proprietary follow-up processes and research ensure that your payments are applied by vendors correctly and consistently.

PK HELPS OPTIMIZE EXPENSE AND DATA MANAGEMENT

With experience in bill management in a wide variety of industries, PK enables you to streamline the process of managing bills and payments across sites. The PK solution offers:

Transparency

The EMS Expense and Data Management offering is hosted and managed in a live environment, making it easy for users to view bank statements and monitor payments online at any time.
We provide executive key performance indicator (KPI) reports with drill-down capabilities. Customers can view bank and payment status online at any point in addition to reports that include re-issue reconciliation, trust fund reconciliation and aging.

Security

Access to the expense and data management system is via secure 128-bit encryption. We have implemented NIST cryptography standards and are PCI-DS compliant. Clients can configure access privileges that vary by role to ensure audit compliance. User setup and management is driven from the front end, and a user history log informs activity reporting.
Easy Data Exchange

The PK offering provides a data exchange mechanism in multiple formats, including comma separated values, fixed-width file formats and XML/cXML web services. It includes built exchange interfaces with all ERPs and proprietary systems, including SAP®, Oracle®, PeopleSoft®, JD Edwards®, Lawson Financials®, QuickBooks® and Yardi®.

International Capability

The EMS Expense and Data Management solution can pay vendors in multiple currencies across 38 countries. It supports payment currency, native currency and reporting currency.

For example, a German vendor may produce bills in Deutsche Marks (native currency) and accept payments in Euros (payment currency). For a global client, reporting requirements across the enterprise may be in U.S. dollars (reporting currency).

Exceptional Situations

EMS provides “out-of-turn” emergency/ad hoc bill payment workflow. Emergencies can be of any nature and the workflow handles bills coming in from a new account not yet affiliated with EMS and bills and accounts with no information on file.

Payment Follow Up

Vendors may not deposit the payment in their banks immediately after receipt or may misapply payments after receipt. A thorough and prompt reconciliation of the payment status and balances carried forward on the bills is required to complete the bill funding workflows. EMS’ proprietary Balances Carried Forward (BCF) and Payment Aging research addresses these issues to ensure consistent results for clients.

THE PK EXPENSE AND DATA MANAGEMENT PROCESS

Account Setup

During the implementation, PK sets up account payment master data attributes, including payment currencies, remittance addresses and payment methods for each active account in the inventory.

Our implementation team develops exhaustive vendor profiles to leverage accepted methods of payment, payment terms and late fee/early payment discount policies.

Subsequent changes to payment master data arising out of vendor correspondence, subsequent bills and optimization of missing bill workflow can be made through EMS Expense and Data Management workflows.

Bank Account and Funding Mechanism Setup

We work with clients to set up a trust bank account with Wells Fargo, a funding mechanism (ACH debit/P-card/Wire transfer) and funding frequency. We recommend a bi-weekly funding cycle for best results.

Funding Workflow

Data from all bills received is captured, verified and QA tested. They are also audited with each transaction saved into multiple Out-Bound Files (OBF) for each business day. The data is then presented on the PK Expense and Data Management platform.

With each funding cycle, these individual OBFs are consolidated into a single funding statement sent to the client. The funding statement is an online statement that requests client funds to pay vendors. Once the statement is finalized, approved and funded, the funding workflow in the Expense and Data Management platform is complete and leads to the offering’s Payment Workflow.

Payment Workflow

EMS Bill payment workflow has a well-defined, secure and NACHA format data exchange mechanism with the PK banking partner, Wells Fargo. The workflow includes generating a payment file (PF), approving the transaction and transmitting it to Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo’s payment manager then acknowledges the files through a secure, encrypted transmission channel and runs payments to the vendors. Reconciliation reports including check images are provided to the PK system and hosted on the platform.