Purchase Request with $0 line item(s)

[sdunham2]

Hoping this is a fairly simple question. Is it possible to have a $0 line item on a Purchase Request in Concur Invoice? We have situations where a PO will have several line items and there may be a line item or more that the value of the line item is $0. So it is needed on the PO for the vendor to provide the purchase item but is being provided at no cost. 

[TriciaW]

@sdunham2 Hello.  I have reached out to our Invoice team for an answer.  I will respond once I hear back.

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[KevinD]

@sdunham2 I did a little test in our training site and was able to add a line to the Purchase request that had a zero dollar amount. I also saved and submitted the request for approval. So, based on what I saw, the answer is yes.

To know for sure, you would need to create a new Purchase Request with a zero amount line item and save to see if any alert appears.

[sdunham2]

Thanks for your reply. It seems that it may be an issue with the API that is treating an external document differently than an entry directly in Concur. This is the piece I'm looking further into now. 

[PoojaKumatkar]

Hi @sdunham2 ,

This may not be a full proof solution to your problem; however, you can try this as a workaround:

1. Create purchase request with required number of line items and update unit price as may be $1 (or 0.0001 etc) against those PR lines where you want to update $0 amount. This way system or API will not give you any error and you will be able to successfully submit PR. 

2. Let PR get it approved and generate PO. 

3. Ask PO Processor to update PO lines against which unit price needs to be updated as $0. Here we will keep Unit prices field modifiable to the PO processor role. so that they can update PO before transmitting it to the vendor.

Also, we can build an audit rule on PO as below:

PO Audit rule - check if any unit price is $1 (or 0.0001) and if yes then trigger hardstop message. We can place this rule on PO transmit event so that PO processor won't be able to transmit PO unless he/she updates unit price in respective line items. Once he/she updates the unit price as $0 (which is not equal to $1 or 0.0001 as per our audit rule condition), system will allow PO processor to transmit updated PO.  

Note - here you can decide any fix amount or fix number to be inputted into PR for such PO lines where you want to update $0 amount and inform your internal PO processor person and also build audit rule condition according to it. This way through system control we can trigger proper exceptions for the PO processor, so that they can do the necessary changes before PO transmission, in case they forget to update PO before transmission.  

Hope this would resolve your issue.

Regards,

Pooja

[sdunham2 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the suggestion Pooja. That suggestion would probably work systematically but will cause some issues in our issuing PO's and corrected PO's to our vendors since the original PO is created in SAP and is sent to the vendor immediately upon approval. To then change the value on the PO to $0 so that it can flow to Concur as an update would also mean that this updated PO would also need to go to the vendor, possibly causing confusion. 

Concur has also suggested sending it as a 0 quantity with some unit price that is not $0. While this may also work, this, again, would cause an issue to the vendor since it looks like we are ordering 0 of an item when in fact are order some actual quantity of the item free of charge. 

Concur has said that this is an issue with the API for moving data from SAP to Concur so without adding a couple manual steps to the standard process in SAP this will not be possible.