Why automating invoice processing is a smart move – Bdaily

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Automated invoice processing offers touchless processing and regulatory compliance, leads to incredible strategic results and skyrockets your growth potential. 80% of C-suite executives believe that automated invoice processing gives them a competitive advantage. This confidence in invoice automation comes from proven benefits like reduced cycle times and increased process visibility.

Invoice automation reduces processing costs by almost 29% - Association for Image & Information Management

Your tried and tested manual invoicing error-prone, outdated, chaos-causing and results in ineffective accounting mechanisms and minuscule improvements. But, equipping your accounts payable team with power of automation can help you smartly address these issues. Technically, automated invoicing or e-invoicing uses robotic process automation (RPA) to facilitate seamless data extraction, accurate data entry and storage. In a few clicks, the payment process can be completed securely with a way-high accuracy. The need for redundant checks is eliminated, which greatly optimizes time and cost.

While we take a deeper dive into why e-invoicing is essential to boost your operational performance and improve your credibility, first lets have a quick look at some of the difficult-to-handle manual invoicing challenges.

Automation-enablement comes with multiple value-added propositions and is a key to success when it comes to re-engineering invoice processing.

Accounts payable automation saves an estimated average of 16 dollars per invoice. - Business Finance magazine

Here are some cost-justifying and convincing reasons in detail explaining why invoice automation is crucial:

Manual invoice processing proves cost-intensive with expenses incurred towards employee payments and bulk paper requirements. Implementing automation throughout the processes gives a way to a truly streamlined invoice processing journey:

One of Canadas largest retailers - having 200 vendors and regularly required to handle 120+ hundred invoices - optimized its invoice processing by implementing automation. Apart from witnessing streamlined document classification and invoice filling, it experienced a remarkable 95% of improvement in invoice data entry.

As one of the key components for providing evidence of tax and payment compliances, invoice is the most important asset to ensuring audit success. Automation leaves no scope for invoice mismanagement and helps chart a growth journey to acquiring certifications, achieving better rankings and getting industry recognized credentials.

e-invoicing optimizes tax compliance costs by around 37-39% - Billentis

More vendors associated to your business mean more periodical invoices that must be processed accurately to prevent loss of trust amongst your business partners. Heres how automation works as a relationship improving agent.

Electronic invoicing could prevent late payment in as much as 39% of invoices and prevent worsening of vendor relationships. - Tungsten Network & the Institute of Finance & Management

Fraud monitoring, detection and prevention are essential to ensuring successful financial operations. Ever mounting invoice data, stringent payment deadlines, and the onus of maintaining long-term relationships with vendors creates pressure on staff, who can easily commit errors, with intentional manipulations for personal benefits not to be ignored. Automated mechanisms come with answers to these issues, as they:

Invoices are a direct input to budget - the most time-consuming activity in any business. This is because they give access to amounts of funds that were disbursed during a given financial cycle. As against manual approaches, automated procedures streamline forecasting of budgetary allocations. Lets see how invoice automation scripts successful budget management:

48% of businesses consider handling exceptions as the top accounts payable problem. - 2015 Ardent Partners Business Survey

Invoice exception handling is one challenging task that demands separate attention from accounts department in a non-automated process. Billentis suggests that in manual invoicing 20-30% of invoices are treated for exceptions. Offering accountants rescue from these inconsistencies, automation yields benefits for the organization by leveraging leaner and better exception handling workflows. This is facilitated as:

Digital invoice management services are fast emerging. They offer exceptional auto-exception resolution work-flows and deploy machine learning algorithms to ensure 100% straight through processing and invoice-PO matching.

Scrambling with invoices in manual processing can leave your accountants tired; and not only entire operational productivity is hampered but their expected involvement in strategic initiatives doesnt become possible. Automation helps achieve the basic aim of optimization, and the saved time and efforts can be devoted to core progressions. Here are more insights.

IOFMs 2018 Future of Accounts Payable Study survey showed that 51% of accounts payable practitioners believe that they will adopt automation in invoice processing by 2021. So, not taking the advantage of robotic process automation (RPA) now means you are keeping yourself in the backseat in the competition.

Digital transformation in invoice processing is no longer a lucrative option rather it has become an imperative. Capitalizing on technological resources through e-invoicing can allow you gain sustainable competitive advantage and help best manage fast changing stakeholder expectations.

When faced with a lack of technical resources for automating accounting cycles, search for and engage with a qualified outsourcing provider. Professional invoice processing service providers are experts in context-based implementations and allow fullest exploitation of artificial intelligence (AI) powered technologies.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Hi-Tech BPO .

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Why automating invoice processing is a smart move - Bdaily