How do you audit vendor invoices in Global Shop Solutions?

Executive Summary

Global Shop Solutions ties purchase orders to jobs and work centers cleanly, which gives an auditor a strong starting point: every vendor charge is already attached to a job number, a work center, or a piece of equipment. What it does not give you is a place to store the terms that charge should have been checked against. There is no field for a volume tier, a rebate threshold, a surcharge cap, or a not-to-exceed clause tied to a labor rate.

The mechanism behind the leakage is simple. Three-way matching in Global Shop Solutions checks the invoice against the PO and the receipt. It confirms quantity and unit price agree with what was ordered.

It does not check whether the unit price on the PO is still the contracted rate, whether a fuel surcharge has expired, or whether a vendor crossed a volume tier that should have triggered a lower rate three invoices ago.

What changes this is treating the contract terms as a separate reference layer, checked against the job cost export on a schedule, rather than expecting the ERP to enforce terms it was never designed to store.

1. What does Global Shop Solutions actually check on a vendor invoice?

Global Shop Solutions checks that the invoice quantity and unit price match the purchase order and that the receipt confirms the goods or service arrived. This three-way match catches a vendor billing for more units than were received or at a price that differs from the PO line. It does not check the PO price itself against a contract, so a PO issued at a stale rate passes the match cleanly with the invoice that copies it.

The match runs entirely inside data the ERP already owns: the PO record, the receiving record, and the AP invoice entry. That is its strength. Every job-related purchase in Global Shop Solutions carries a job number and work center, so a buyer or controller can trace a charge back to the production order that consumed it without leaving the system.

The weakness sits one layer up. Nothing in Global Shop Solutions asks whether the PO price is the price the vendor contract actually specifies this month. If a freight carrier's rate card stepped down at a volume tier the plant crossed last quarter, the PO can carry the old rate indefinitely and every invoice against it will match perfectly.

2. Where does drift hide in a Global Shop Solutions AP file?

Drift hides in the fields Global Shop Solutions has no place to store: the rate card behind a freight PO, the not-to-exceed cap on a maintenance work order, the rebate tier on a bulk MRO contract, the escalation clause in a staffing agreement. Every one of these lives in a PDF outside the ERP, and the invoice references only the PO, so nothing in the job cost report tests it against the term that governs it.

Contract labor and staffing invoices are a common example. Global Shop Solutions records the hours billed against a work order and the rate charged, but the escalation clause, the overtime multiplier cap, and the not-to-exceed ceiling live in the staffing agreement, not in a PO field. An invoice can bill correctly against its own PO and still exceed what the underlying contract allows.

Maintenance and calibration invoices carry the same pattern. A repair ticket closes against a work order, the invoice matches the ticket, and the audit stops there. Whether the labor rate on that ticket still matches the service agreement signed two years ago is a separate question the ERP never asks.

3. How do you reconcile a Global Shop Solutions job cost export against contract terms?

Export job cost detail by vendor and cost category, then build a separate reference table of contract terms: rate cards, tier thresholds, NTE caps, rebate schedules. Match the two on vendor and date range rather than relying on the ERP's PO match, because the PO match only confirms internal consistency, not that the contracted rate is the one in force. This reconciliation runs outside Global Shop Solutions entirely.

The practical version of this looks like a periodic pull, not a live control. Someone exports vendor invoice detail by cost category, whether that is freight, contract labor, or MRO, for a defined period. That export includes vendor, PO number, unit price, quantity and job reference, all fields Global Shop Solutions already tracks cleanly.

That export then gets checked line by line against the contract terms held outside the system: the current rate card, the volume tier schedule, the rebate clause, the surcharge expiration date. A rate schedule violation shows up as a unit price on the invoice that no longer matches the current tier. A surcharge that should have expired shows up as a line item still present after its trigger condition ended.

A. A. Cost categories to pull first

Freight and 3PL invoices carry the most fields per line: base rate, fuel surcharge, accessorial charges, each with its own trigger condition. Contract labor and maintenance invoices carry fewer fields but longer contract terms, since a staffing rate or a service agreement typically runs 12 to 24 months without a PO update.

MRO and Class C consumables sit at the other end: high transaction count, low dollar value per line, where the leakage comes from missed volume rebates accumulating across hundreds of small invoices rather than any single overbilled line.

4. Can Global Shop Solutions enforce a not-to-exceed cap automatically?

No. Global Shop Solutions has no field designed to hold a not-to-exceed cap and compare it against cumulative billing on a work order. A user can track spend against a budget line manually, but the system will not stop or flag an invoice that pushes total billing past a contractual ceiling, because that ceiling exists only in the vendor agreement, not in any table the ERP reads.

This is a structural limit, not a configuration gap. The ERP's job costing module tracks actual cost against estimated cost for a job, which looks similar to an NTE check but answers a different question. A job can run under its cost estimate while a specific vendor's cumulative billing on that job exceeds the cap written into their service agreement, and Global Shop Solutions has no way to see the second fact.

Closing this gap without new software means tracking NTE-capped vendors on a separate list and checking cumulative billing against the cap manually at invoice time or on a monthly cadence. It is not a difficult check. It is simply a check the ERP was not built to run for you.

5. Should a manufacturer add software or run a one-time audit first?

Run the audit first when you cannot yet name which vendor categories or contract terms are actually leaking, because software configured before you know the answer gets set up against guessed rules. A one-time diagnostic against the job cost export identifies which categories carry real drift, which then tells you exactly what a forward control needs to check, rather than what it was assumed to need.

The order matters because the cost of getting it backward compounds. A contract enforcement tool configured against assumptions about which vendors matter, rather than against findings from an actual reconciliation, spends its first months enforcing the wrong rate cards while the real leakage continues in categories nobody flagged.

A one-time reconciliation against the job cost export costs a fixed amount of analyst time and produces a ranked list: which vendors, which contract terms, which dollar exposure. That list is what a forward-looking control should be built against, whether that control is a spreadsheet macro, a query someone runs monthly, or a purchased tool.

6. What does this cost to leave unchecked?

Margin drift across a full diagnostic typically runs 1% to 3% of service vendor spend, and a full diagnostic typically finds $300K to $4.5M per year, across ValueXPA diagnostics. Both figures describe the whole population of service vendor spend, not any single category, so they should not be read as an estimate for freight, labor, or MRO alone. What they establish is that the exposure is large enough to justify a structured review rather than an ad hoc one.

These figures come from work across manufacturers running a range of ERPs, not from Global Shop Solutions specifically, and they describe total service vendor spend rather than any one cost category. Treat them as the reason to look, not as a prediction of what a Global Shop Solutions user will find.

The actual number for one plant depends on how many service vendor contracts carry tiered rates, escalation clauses, or NTE caps, and how long those contracts have run without a term-by-term recheck against billing. A vendor list with five long-running staffing and freight contracts carries more exposure than one with fifty small, short-term MRO vendors, regardless of total spend.

7. What should an AP lead do differently starting this month?

Pull a job cost export by vendor for the last 12 months, separate it by cost category, and set the contract terms for your five largest service vendors next to it. Check unit price against the current rate card, check cumulative billing against any NTE cap, and check for rebate thresholds crossed without a rate adjustment. This single pass, done once, tells you more than any ERP report Global Shop Solutions can generate on its own.

Start with vendors that have run the longest without a new PO, since a long-running PO is the clearest sign that nobody has recently checked its price against the current contract. Freight carriers and staffing agencies are the usual candidates, because their rate cards change on a schedule the PO does not automatically follow.

Document what the reconciliation finds even when it finds nothing, because a clean check on a major vendor is itself useful information for the next review cycle. The goal is not a one-time cleanup but a repeatable method, built once and run again every year, that does not depend on Global Shop Solutions gaining a capability it was not designed to have.

For the wider pattern this sits inside, start with the margin drift guide. See also the six categories drift hides in and what is margin erosion? causes and prevention for manufacturers.

8. Frequently Asked Questions (People Also Ask)

Does Global Shop Solutions have a contract management module?

No. Global Shop Solutions manages purchase orders, receiving, and job costing, but it has no module for storing contract terms like rate cards, rebate tiers, or not-to-exceed caps. Those terms have to be tracked separately and checked against invoice detail exported from the ERP.

Can three-way matching in Global Shop Solutions catch a stale rate card?

No. Three-way matching confirms the invoice agrees with the PO and the receipt. If the PO itself carries an outdated price because nobody updated it when the vendor's rate card changed, the invoice matches cleanly and the stale rate goes undetected.

What vendor categories should a Global Shop Solutions user check first?

Freight and 3PL, contract labor and staffing, and maintenance and repair are reasonable starting points because these categories typically involve contract terms, like surcharge schedules or escalation clauses, that sit outside any PO field. MRO and calibration invoices are worth a separate pass focused on rebate thresholds.

Is this the same as a standard AP audit?

A standard AP audit inside Global Shop Solutions checks for duplicate invoice numbers, missing receipts, and PO mismatches. A contract compliance check goes further: it verifies the PO price itself against the vendor's current contract terms, which the ERP does not do.

How often should this reconciliation run?

An annual pass against your largest service vendor contracts catches most rate drift before it compounds. Vendors with volume tiers or seasonal surcharges, like freight carriers, benefit from a quarterly check since their terms change more often than an annual review would catch.

Can this be done in a spreadsheet without new software?

Yes, for a defined set of vendors and cost categories. The job cost export from Global Shop Solutions gives you invoice-level detail; a spreadsheet holding current contract terms next to it lets you check the two by hand. It does not scale indefinitely, but it works for an initial pass.

Does this apply to job-based work orders as well as stock purchases?

Yes. Job-based purchases carry the job number and work center Global Shop Solutions tracks well, which actually makes the reconciliation easier since you can trace a charge to a specific production order. The contract term check still has to happen outside the system either way.

What is the first sign a Global Shop Solutions AP file has a rate card problem?

A PO that has not been updated in over a year while the vendor's invoices continue against it is the clearest sign. Long-running POs are where a contract's rate card or tier schedule most often drifts out of sync with what is actually being billed.