Lead Agency Staff

Common Troublespot: Who can approve what? Who has access to what?

In STAR, all vendor and approver permissions - the permissions for creation of invoiced services and their approval - are organized by project. Very often the project overlaps with a given fund source, but this is not always the case: many fund sources are saved under multiple projects, and many projects make use of multiple fund sources.

When communicating with Falling Colors about users' permissions for approval and/or vendor access, please make sure you know which project the funding is labeled under. Projects you have access to work with will be listed in the second column of the Burn Rate report - so this is the best place to determine which project you are talking about. You will see fund source and provider information listed here as well.

Be careful not to confuse project with program - a program in STAR is a broader designation, which may contain multiple projects.

For a list of approvers in any given project, take a look at the Program Managers report, available from the Invoices dashboard.

A provider has told me they have uploaded an invoice. Why can’t I find it in my Pending Approval list?

This might be confusion over the difference between STAR Invoices and Pending Services - or about the invoicing schedule.

Invoices are groups of services (which might themselves be agency invoices) that have been grabbed by the system and made available for review/approval by lead agency staff.

Pending Services are new submissions made by service providers. These are still "fresh," and they can be edited or deleted by the provider. However, they cannot yet be approved and won't show up in any of the approval sections of STAR for review. Many pending services are records of submissions of an invoice by the agency, hence the confusion in terminology.

All projects in STAR follow an Invoicing schedule. The Invoicing Schedule determines when Pending Services will be grouped into an invoice and appear in “Pending Approval.”

For most projects, this will occur either nightly or semimonthly. Semimonthly invoices are created on the 1st and 16th of the month.

All invoices are created at the earliest possible time on that day, i.e., at 12:00 or 12:01 am.

Funding has been added to a provider’s account - why can’t they see it in STAR?

This is usually a permissions issue. Make sure that the provider has been granted the right permissions.

In order for a provider to see available funding listed in their account, they need access to the project it was allocated under.

Permissions in STAR must be requested specifically for each user - they are not automatically given. This means, when a new project is added to a provider’s account, Falling Colors needs an additional request to grant user access to this project.

The request can come from either Lead Agency staff or the provider’s vendor administrator user(s).

If there are still difficulties, take a look at the client-based billing troubleshooting guide or non-client-based billing troubleshooting guide (depending on how the provider will be billing).

How do I know whether a provider has been paid for an invoice?

There are a couple of ways to check.

The first is on the invoice itself. You can review the status of the Invoice by bringing it up in the Invoice History feature. In addition to the invoice showing up in the Paid list, a dollar sign symbol indicates that a payment has been issued:

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The second way is to check the Payment Detail report, available from the individual provider’s dashboard. From there, you can search for the invoice number - many payments are for multiple invoices, so it will often be grouped with other invoices.

I’m marking an invoice for corrections, but STAR is telling me “One or more services must be selected.” What does that mean?

In order for corrections to be saved, at least one line item needs to be selected on the invoice. This is true, even if there is only one line item.

To do this, begin the corrections process using the action menu in the top-left corner of the invoice. Then, in the DETAIL tab, select the services that the corrections apply to. You select them by clicking to the left of the Service Date. A checkmark should appear when you’ve made your selection.

After you’ve selected all the services and filled out all the necessary information in the action menu, you can submit the needed corrections, and the invoice will be sent to the provider.

I’m approving an invoice. I want to remove certain line items, but I don’t want to either deny the invoice or correct anything. What do I do?

If you want certain line items removed, rather than changed, the process is the same as if you were indicating a correction. Mark the invoice for corrections and select the line item(s) in question, then send the invoice back to the provider. The provider will have the ability to delete the entire line item if that’s what’s required.

Does the provider need to open a billing window to submit corrections?

Generally speaking, no.

Once an invoice has been marked for corrections, there is a 30-day window for the corrections to be submitted, no matter what the current billing window is.

If the invoice is not corrected within that window, it is automatically denied and the funding is released back to the provider. Denied invoices can be reset to Pending Approval status, by request.

The only times a billing window will be necessary, is if the invoice needs a major change, such as the month of services (for services grouped by month) or a different fund source is needed. If that’s the case, please contact Support, and we will assist you through the process.