How To Work This Thing This presentation is intended to make filling out a Buff Form easier; however, some may find it difficult to maneuver efficiently betwixt all the glitz and glamour so here are a few pointers: If you don’t want to watch the parade, simply hit enter. Hitting enter repeatedly will skip over the good parts and still get you where you need to go. Hitting enter once will stop the present slide, for a time, just in case you want to take time to re-read something; hitting enter twice will advance you to the next slide.

Accounts Payable Requisitions a/k/a Buff Forms Two things to remember: –Buff Forms pay for goods received (or services rendered) that were NOT ordered with a Purchase Order. –Payment for services rendered requires a Contract For Services attached to the Buff Form. Per Federal regulations, the Attestation Form connected to the Contract for Services must be attached to the Buff Form.

Paint By Numbers The complicated and oft times painful process of filling out a Buff Form is conveniently broken down into twelve easy-to-follow steps. It sounds like a lot of steps, yes, but twelve isn’t really bad. Wait until you get to Expense Vouchers.

1. Vendor Address This is the vendor’s name and REMIT TO address, which is not to be confused with their mailing address. The REMIT TO address can be found on the invoice, in most cases.

2. Requisition Date You guessed it. Today’s date.

3. FTIN/FID If you haven’t paid an invoice from this vendor before, enter the vendor’s FTIN (Federal Tax ID Number) a/k/a FID (Federal ID Number). If one is not provided on the invoice, you can get it by calling the vendor.

4. Invoice Date Yes. The date of the invoice.

5. Invoice # This is a very important part of The Process; it is essential that it is correctly represented or all is for naught. This is especially important for duplicate invoices. On that subject, be very careful when submitting invoices you think you already paid but the company said you didn’t because SAP, although a fine and pleasant misery, doesn’t ALWAYS catch duplicate invoices. If you submit it twice and it is paid twice you are twice as likely to have lost that money from your budget than you would have been had you simply recorded it the first time somewhere in your internal accounting system and fought to the death the vendor’s accusation.

6. Amount Again, yes. The amount of the invoice.

7. Cost Center/WBS # Put the Cost Center/WBS (budget code) from which you would like the invoice paid. If splitting the invoice between multiple budget codes, feel free to take up all the lines you need, but please don’t exceed the amount of lines provided— instead, feel free to use up another Buff Form with your additional budget codes. Make sure your splits add up to the invoice total.

8. Description of Item SAP requires that every single solitary line of coding has a description attached to it. This is especially handy for you when researching your expenditures even if it IS a pain for us Accounts Payable clerks who have to leave our beloved keypads to enter something as pedestrian as text. But there is no price we accounting clerks aren’t willing to pay in order to make your lives easier.

9. Requisition Total Add em up. Move em out. Rawhide.

10. Quotations Received From If your purchase is $5,000 or more, two additional vendors must be listed and supporting paperwork must be kept on file in your office for audit purposes—refer to SAP Procurement Policies located in the Forms Repository on for details. If no additional vendors are listed, one of the boxes under “Explanation for Non-Bid Purchase” must be checked, otherwise payment cannot be made.

11. Requested By The person filling out the requisition is the person who signs here.

12. Approved By The budget code fund controller signs here. Every budget code represented requires the fund controller’s signature.

Now… Staple the ORIGINAL invoice to your Buff Form and submit it to the Business Office for payment. You no longer need to attach a copy of the invoice, as NIS has made it possible for us to house our own records, creating a mountain of paperwork that will take three and a half years to shred 75 years from now when we are legally allowed to shred State Stuffs, thus allowing you the opportunity to save five point five cents in copying charges. That’s five point five cents per invoice. So it adds up.

That wasn’t so hard, now was it?