09 Mar Why it’s so important to keep Amazon Vendor invoicing up to date

• Having exhaustive and meticulous control of invoices issued and above all, those yet to be issued is crucial to the success of any business.
• As Vendor accounts work directly as an Amazon supplier, having an unissued invoice means missing out on a lot of money.

Can you imagine having a business, providing a service and not getting paid for it? And if this service is on a large scale and there’s a large amount of money involved? Well, this is what can happen if you have a Vendor account on Amazon and you aren’t rigorous or strict with the invoices you must issue.

As we’ve seen before, having a Vendor account means becoming a supplier of Amazon, supplying it with a series of products according to the contract signed. In this contract, the price for the delivered goods and the payment terms are agreed upon.

This may vary between customers and between contracts, but it’s something to pay special attention to.

If you want to know why, and what we do at Nozama Solutions to manage this type of incident, read on and we’ll tell you all about it.

What can poor invoice management lead to?

When you work as a Vendor seller for Amazon, you have to invoice absolutely everything you send to their warehouses. An unissued invoice, which may be associated with a single order or an ASN or any type of order from Amazon, can result in you not being paid. This is similar to if you go to a restaurant and they don’t bring the bill for you to pay.

As you can imagine, this can be quite a significant problem because as a general rule, the platform handles large orders that usually involve substantial amounts of money.

What can be done?

Don’t worry. The fact that you didn’t issue an invoice at the right time doesn’t mean that you won’t be paid for that amount, as there’s no legal mechanism to stop paying for goods received.

At Nozama Solutions, as part of our Audit service, we carry out an exhaustive follow-up of all shipments made by our clients to Amazon and the invoices issued.

As soon as we find an inconsistency, we inform our clients to try to solve it as soon as possible, proceeding to make the relevant invoice. This is because 90 days after shipment, it’s harder to justify why it wasn’t issued in a timely manner.

However, as long as you keep the proper shipping and delivery receipts in your warehouses, where you can check that all the ordered goods have been delivered, there are usually no problems in receiving payment from Amazon.

The three unbilled cycles review

At Nozama Solutions, our experience of more than 10 years working with Amazon has helped us to develop a methodology that we call «the three unbilled cycles review». This is a differential value that allows our customers to anticipate any type of problem.

We start from the premise that each client has a defined invoicing cycle: some do it for each order, others for each ASN and others group them together for a specific period of time and then invoice them all together.

Thanks to this, we’re in charge of reviewing all invoicing to detect any type of alteration in the orders, whether it’s a downward or upward change, which is repeated during 3 complete cycles. In this way, our experts can adjust commercial strategies to these results.

At the end of the day, it’s all about anticipating anything that might happen and trying to solve it or take advantage of it as early as possible.