First DPS Invoice Paid

October 9, 2008 Comments Off

The first DPS invoice has worked its way through the entire process and our customer has confirmed they received payment on this invoice. We apologize for the lack of updates recently, but we have been attending the HHGFAA conference in Hawaii, which has made it difficult to find time to do updates. Let us try to fill you in on what has happened since our last update, and what still needs to be done.

Our latest update indicated that the invoice had been sent to the PowerTrack test server. SRA determined this was caused by an incorrect item in the DPS EDI feed, which was quickly resolved and the invoice order was resent by DPS. This time, the invoice order made it PowerTrack production, but for some reason it failed to show up in the PowerTrack interface. So even though PowerTrack confirmed receiving it, we could not see it. This was a problem PowerTrack was having last week, and they traced it to an EDI mapping issue on there end. They were able to get the problem fixed, and we were able to see the invoice in PowerTrack.

Unfortunately, when we saw the invoice, we discovered it was in Audit Exception status. There were 5 line items on the invoice, and on 3 of them, our ratings did not match the DPS ratings. Linehaul, fuel surcharge, and packing/unpacking were the three items codes that did not match. We expected issues with the last 2, since they have been issues all throughout the testing process (however, we do believe we are close to resolving both issues). The linehaul discrepancy was a surprise, and the cause for concern. We have had success matching linehaul ratings, and had taken that off our list of problem item codes. We have yet to confirm the reason that the DPS linehaul rating did not match ours, but we have some theories and hope to be able to resolve that one very soon.

As is the procedure in the current program, we submitted a corrected invoice to PowerTrack matching the DPS rating amounts so that the customer could get paid for the majority of the invoice. (Even though 3 of the 5 line items did not match, the dollar amount difference was only around $200.) Needless to say that we will be submitting a supplemental invoice for the difference still owed the TSP once we are able to confirm the cause of the linehaul discrepancy. Once we do that, we will post an update here, as well as some thoughts on what we learned from this first “real” DPS invoice.