Dear Okochi-san,
The current situation of preparing invoice for Mitsui regarding seconded employees for the month of Jan 2014 is nearly finish. We can send the invoice to Noguchi-san by this coming Thursday.
Since it is the first month and since we, including seconded employees, are busy with the preparation for our lab grand opening ceremony, the process was delayed and our accounting department had just received the completed documents from Gap and seconded employees last week.
From now on, after discussing with our accounting team, I propose the process to be as follow.
First the cut-off date for monthly expenses that related to seconded employees will be the last day of each month. Then, the team at Gap and seconded employees will have to prepare all the documents related to expenses, such as PR form, invoices or receipts, and send it to our accounting team at head office within three working days. After our accounting team at head office received the documents, they would process to key all the expenses to our SAP and will prepare the invoice to be ready within seven working days. After that we can send the invoice to Japan and another copy to Inoue-san.
Regarding the service fees that related to the agreement, such as lab service fee 1 and 2 (lab rental and equipment rental), personnel service fee, accommodation and food service fee, etc., the invoice for these fees can be prepared by our accounting team at head office within three working days after the end of each month and can send to Japan right after that, separately from the expenses that arise from activities relating to seconded employees.
For the mean of document sending, we will scan the invoice to PDF file first and send the actual one by courier later on.
Please let me know if you would like to make some correction to this proposed process and scheme.