Invoice receipt before goods receipt
These items reverse the expected receipt-before-invoice order.
Power BI report examples
Purchase-to-Pay Flow and Bottleneck Review
A six-page Power BI report and verified event-log build using the complete BPI Challenge 2019 source to show purchase-order routes, waiting time, repeated work, payment risk and individual item history.
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Six Power BI Desktop pages connect the overall process position to route, transition, exception and item-level evidence.
One purchase-order item, eleven events
An invoice was blocked, cancelled and later cleared twice.
Item 4507020650/00140 comes from the anonymised purchasing process published for BPI Challenge 2019. It moves from purchase-order creation to goods receipt and invoice receipt, then through a payment block, cancellation and clearing.
The full sequence can then be compared with common routes, helping the process owner decide which hand-offs and purchase items need closer investigation.
The process question
Which purchase items wait, repeat work or encounter a payment block?
The analysis keeps every event in order, groups identical complete sequences into variants and measures elapsed time between adjacent activities. It helps identify routes and exact items for review without claiming that sequence alone proves the cause.
- Complete sequence variants
- 11,973
- Items with repeated activities
- 22,438
- Explicit payment-block items
- 122
The purchase-to-pay route
Follow the actual purchasing activities rather than a generic process diagram.
Purchase-order creation, goods receipt, invoice receipt and clearing form the main route. Invoice-first cases, repeated work and payment blocks remain visible as branches that can be opened down to the underlying item and events.
What the complete log shows
The most common route covers one item in five, not the whole process.
The leading sequence contains 50,286 items, or 19.98% of the full log. Across all items, the median recorded duration is 64.0 days.
Median invoice-to-receipt wait
The measure uses only valid invoice-to-goods transitions.
Median block-removal-to-clearing wait
This hand-off is a practical place for the process owner to start.
Purchase-order item 4507020650_00140
The block was removed before clearing, but the route still needs review.
The item was created on 16 Apr 2018. Accounts Payable recorded the invoice on 06 Aug 2018, followed eight minutes later by Set Payment Block.
Cancel Subsequent Invoice followed fourteen days later. Remove Payment Block was then recorded, the invoice cleared nine days later and a second clearing event appeared in November.
- Item category
- 3-way match, invoice before GR
- Document type
- Standard PO
- Recorded duration
- 200.2 days
- Outcome
- Invoice cleared
Investigate the cancelled invoice and payment-block route. The block was removed before the invoice was cleared.
Power BI report
Six pages connect process scale to routes, waits, exceptions and one item.
Choose a page from the list or use Previous and Next. The screenshot stays in the same viewer, and a larger view opens only when selected.
The report's broad payment-block flag covers 55,934 items. The separate event-log analysis counts 122 items containing an explicit Set Payment Block event. They answer different questions and are not presented as reconciled measures.
Page 1 of 6
Where does purchase to pay slow down?
- What this page shows
- Where does purchase-to-pay work slow down, and which hand-offs should be reviewed first?
- How it supports the analysis
- Start with hand-offs that combine high volume with high median or p90 waiting time, then open the transition records.
- What to notice
- The report covers 251,734 purchase-order items and 1,595,923 events. The typical adjacent-event wait is 51.3 hours across 11,973 recorded routes.
- Important context
- the time series includes timestamp exceptions and historical outliers. Sequence and elapsed time identify records for review but do not establish root cause.
Scale and checks
The figures shown here are calculated from the complete process log and checked against the source totals.
251,734purchase-order items
1,595,923recorded events
42activities
627recorded users
11,973complete variants
17/17source and report checks
- 01
The XES checksum matches the publisher file before transformation begins.
- 02
All 251,734 purchase-order items and 1,595,923 events reach the process model.
- 03
Events stay in source order when two activities share the same timestamp.
- 04
Every item belongs to one complete activity-sequence variant.
- 05
Repeated activities remain separate from named changes, cancellations and reversals.
- 06
The 320 timestamp exceptions stay in event counts but are excluded from elapsed-time measures.
- 07
The selected item reproduces its eleven source events and final clearing outcome.
Check results
All 17 checks passed
The build keeps 2018 and 2019 events for valid elapsed-time calculations. A further 320 publisher records remain in event counts but are excluded from elapsed-time measures.
- Documents
- 76,349
- Elapsed-time period
- 2018 to 2019
- Timestamp exceptions
- 320
- Example item
- 4507020650_00140
About the data
The source is historical, and the sequence alone cannot explain why a delay occurred.
The process analysis uses the BPI Challenge 2019 event log published by 4TU.ResearchData under CC BY 4.0. The records are historical, anonymised research data and do not describe current performance.
The example uses BPI Challenge 2019 research data. Event sequence, frequency and elapsed time can identify records for investigation, but they do not establish why a delay occurred or what intervention will resolve it.
Industrial purchasing and Accounts Payable
Purchase Order, Receipt and Invoice Reconciliation
An Accounts Payable analyst holds an invoice until the purchase order, warehouse receipt and supplier bill agree within tolerance. Every unresolved difference keeps its reason and the team responsible for the next step.
What it helps answer: Can the supplier invoice be released for payment, held for investigation or returned for correction?
- Platform
- BPI Challenge 2019 with a SQL and Python matching build
- Data scale
- 251,734 purchase order items and 1,595,923 events from the complete BPI Challenge 2019 event log, verified
- Project status
- Built and checked with SQL and Python. All 21 controls pass, the item and event totals agree, and the rebuild is repeatable.
Next step
Connect process findings to the purchase items behind them.
Start with the question the report needs to answer, the records that supply it and one result that needs checking.