Introducing E-Invoice delivery for AWS customers using SAP Ariba and Coupa

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of AWS E-Invoice delivery, a new capability that enables you to integrate your Ariba and Coupa procurement portals with AWS. AWS E-Invoice delivery retrieves purchase orders (PO) from your Ariba and Coupa portals and delivers invoices associated with your desired POs. This new feature eliminates two manual tasks: creating POs in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and uploading invoices to your procurement portals.

Legacy Invoice delivery challenges

If you used SAP Business Network (formerly known as SAP Ariba) or Coupa procurement portals, you either had to send your PO details to AWS Support teams or manually enter them directly into the AWS Billing and Cost Management console (BCM). These steps were necessary to associate AWS invoices with your purchase orders. This contributed to delays in the upload of AWS invoices to your SAP Business Network and Coupa portals. You received invoices associated with your POs via email or downloaded them from the AWS BCM console. You then had to open individual invoices to look up key attributes and manually enter them into your SAP Business Network and Coupa procurement portal accounts, along with uploading the invoice PDF document. This manual process potentially made your invoice processing workflow time-consuming, error-prone, and lacking in auditability.

Automated e-invoice delivery

With AWS E-Invoice delivery, you can now receive AWS invoices associated with your desired POs on the same day. This makes your invoice processing more efficient and scalable in a timely manner while eliminating manual intervention.

How it works

AWS E-invoice delivery is a billing feature that enables you to retrieve PO information from your procurement portals (e.g., SAP Ariba), embed the information into your AWS invoices, and deliver the PO-matched AWS invoices back to your procurement portals.

To receive AWS E-Invoices:

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/costmanagement/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Preferences -> Billing Preferences.

3. Click Add connection button (as shown on Figure 1) on the Procurement portal settings section. This will open the ‘Add Connection’ wizard.

Figure 1: AWS Billing and cost Management Console

4. The first step of the ‘Add Connection’ wizard is to request activating the features available through the procurement portal integration: 1) E-Invoice Delivery and 2) Purchase order retrieval. You can choose one or both features to retrieve purchase orders from the selected procurement portal and deliver invoices to the portal.

5. Choose your procurement portal and enter the procurement portal connection details (as shown on Figure 2 and Figure 3 for SAP Ariba and Coupa portals, respectively).

Figure 2. Add Portal Information to your connection request – SAP Ariba

Figure 3. Add Portal Information to your connection request – Coupa

Set the E-Invoice delivery preferences

You can choose Delivery preferences (as shown in Figure 4) including 1) Document types to be delivered, 2) Preference to deliver invoice PDF to portal and 3) Start date of E-Invoice delivery, and Invoice Requirements including 1) Purchase Order requirement, 2) Seller of Records (Optional) and 3) Invoice Units created using Invoice Configuration feature (Optional).

Figure 4. Add E-Invoice Delivery Preferences to your connection request

6. Accept the terms to retrieve purchase orders from your procurement portal. Upon activation (as shown in Figure 5), POs are retrieved from the procurement portal and will be available within 15 minutes in the Purchase Order section of AWS Billing and Cost Management console.

Figure 5: Activate Purchase order retrieval

7. Choose a testing method from the available options. You can choose to test in a sandbox environment or production environment (as shown in Figures 6 and 7).

• Test environment: Enter the test environment details to send test invoices. AWS will send test invoices to the preferred test environment.

Figure 6. Testing Method – Test environment

• Production environment: AWS will send a $1.00 invoice for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services to the most recently used purchase order.

Figure 7. Testing Method – Production environment

8. Add your preferred contact name and email address for testing.

9. Review and Submit request for connecting with your procurement portal and activating AWS E-invoice delivery.

10. Upon submission, the connection status will show as ‘Requested.’ AWS will reach out to the provided test email to verify the account within 24 hours.

11. After account verification, the connection status will show as ‘Test Initiated.’ AWS will send test invoices to the selected test method.

12. AWS will contact the provided test email to confirm the success of the test. Upon successful test completion, the connection status will show as ‘Activated.’

13. The connection status will be available in the main procurement portals page (as shown in Figure 8) and in the connection details page.

Figure 8. Connection status

14. You will also be able to edit and delete the connection status by clicking the ‘Actions’ button.

Conclusion

Enable AWS E-Invoice delivery billing capability today to experience AWS invoice delivery to your SAP Business Network and Coupa procurement accounts to promote streamlined invoice processing. Learn more about this capability in our documentation and start planning your onboarding. Please reach out to AWS Support or concierge teams if you have any additional questions on the onboarding process.