How Can Invoice Automation Help Your Accounts Payable Department?

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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Businesses are always looking for ways to eliminate paper from their business process and with the advent of new technology, such as Documation’s document management solutions, businesses can now significantly reduce the amount of paper that they process manually.

PayStream Advisors recently released a new report, titled Invoice & Workflow Automation Adoption Benchmarking Survey 2012, which features some of the challenges and goals within the Accounts Payable (AP) department as well as invoice processing costs and automated workflow adoption. There were some interesting and quite shocking statistics in the report, such as 20% of the AP professional’s surveyed said that they are happy with their current, paper-based process. This is surprising to hear as paper is considered to be one of the main challenges in AP.

One of the many problems with manually processing paper is that you can easily misplace an important document and never see it again – for the AP department this can be a very costly and time consuming error. Investing in an Invoice Management Solution could help your business to considerably ...
... reduce costs within your AP department, as well as reducing the amount of time spent manually keying information into the finance system. By automating invoice processing, businesses can reduce the risk of losing important documents, because once scanned into the finance system they will automatically be stored for future reference.

So why automate your invoice process? There are far reaching benefits for automating your invoice process which can help to improve your business process as well as:

- Improved productivity of the Accounts Payable team
- Improved supplier relations
- Improved control over key business processes
- Improved level of service to internal departments
- Improved management information
- Reduced data entry costs
- Reduced cost and time in coding and authorising invoices
- Reduced cost and time in resolving discrepancies
- Reduced document storage costs

By automating the process in your AP department staff will be able to concentrate on more strategic tasks, allowing the team to become more productive.

Your suppliers will also benefit as queries will be dealt with more quickly, because all the invoice information and accompanying details can be instantly retrieved and the query answered, saving time and removing the cost of calling them back.

You will have more control over your business process as your invoices will be coded, matched or authorised and become ready for payment much faster than manually processing invoices.

Your whole business will benefit from automating your invoices, as authorisers outside of the AP department will be able to view an invoice and the status in order to answer supplier queries without referring to the AP team.

At Documation we believe investing in an automated system will benefit the whole company, not just the department it is installed in. Over the years more and more companies have been adopting the paper free process by investing in an automated system, and AIIM reports that 42% of users have achieved a payback period of 12 months or less from their scanning and capture investments. 57% are posting a payback of 18-months or less.