To: Management Council Members; VPs of Finance; and all eVA end users
From: Shared Services Center
Reason: Blanket Purchase Order Process
Date: November 8, 2023
Dear Colleges,
As you are aware, when all Commonwealth Agencies migrated to our new eVA system, the ability to create variable price Blanket Purchase Orders (BPOs) became available. While we (End-users, SSC, SO, Colleges) all were excited about having this option, SSC has discovered that the downstream payment process for BPOs structured this way is tricky at best. Specifically, when the total amount of the BPO is entered in the unit price field, the Accounting Specialists must enter a percentage to be able to create a voucher with the correct amount. While that is tricky, the real struggle is that this often creates a rounding error and AIS returns these entries as exceptions. In other words, instead of improving the end-to-end process with this BPO option, inefficiencies ensued.
The SSC Accounting Team would like to ask End Users and the Procurement Team to revert to the previous methodology that we used in eVA Classic when entering new BPOs in New eVA.
A Couple of Notes:
- If you have any existing BPOs using the variable price, please allow it to finish as these BPOs do not behave well with Change Orders.
- There is NO change to structuring methods for BPOs with fixed prices and fixed quantities or fixed prices and estimated quantities.
Reminder of eVA Classic BPO Steps:
- Steps: In eVA, Under Item Description, input the estimate of the total dollar value of the goods/services to be purchased in the Order Quantity field and use 1.00 as the Unit Price under Estimate Costs.
- Example: A college frequently purchases widgets from a contracted vendor that provides next-day delivery. The items and their prices are highly variable. After reviewing the previous fiscal year spend, the college estimates that it will purchase $21,250 of widgets from the contracted vendor during the current fiscal year. Create a line item for the widgets with a Unit Price of $1.00 and an Order Quantity of 21,250.
If you have any questions, you may contact the SSC Customer Engagement team at 877-340-5577 or help@ssc.vccs.edu.
