These are only 8 of the reasons Why You Should Automate Your Invoice Processing

Did you land on our website because you have been thinking about automating your invoicing process? You’re in the right place. Optiform is an ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices re-seller and solutions partner, so once you read these 8 compelling reasons to automate, you’ll have a better understanding of why you should get started today.

Automating Saves Time:

When your office is closed, do emails, faxes, and mail still arrive? Who is handling the incoming invoices after hours? What about when your AP coders are on vacation, medical leave, or take other days off? Suppliers offer early payment discounts and if you are still relying on your staff to process each document, you may be overpaying for services and products as well as jeopardizing the relationship with your vendor. 

Improves Quality:

The error-prone process of manual AP data entry is too important for you to leave to chance. Automating limits the amount of manual data entry, therefore increasing the accuracy and quality of the data entered into your ERP or financial software.

Increases Visibility:

CFO’s should have access quickly at a glance into cash flow. A manual AP process can take days and at times weeks to process. Automation allows executives to make business decisions using current data and alleviates them from having to rely only on historical data for financial reporting. Hindsight may still be 20/20, but live data is just as important.

Controls Process:

The overall control of a manual Accounts Payable process is flawed. Organizations are relying on paper in the form of printed invoice copies, purchase orders to be found and manually compared to be sure the invoice submitted is in accordance with the PO, notes that are expected to make their way to the appropriate parties each step of the way, and the hopeful confidence that once an invoice has hit the AP coders desk the document will actually be processed timely and accurately. How many times have you walked into an office and seen a stack of papers sitting on a desk? Automation reduces the need to shuffle paper, print electronic versions of invoices, risk the loss of important paper by handing documents person to person throughout the organization, and gives you the visibility you need with electronic PO matching with invoices.

Controls Cost:

When calculating the cost of your manual AP process, consider the salaries of the coders as well as Accounts Payable management. Consider the storage you have to account for; both physical storage in the form of file cabinets as well as server space at data centers. You also have mail room costs, paper, printers, scanners, expedited shipping costs when mailing payment because you have not processed an invoice quickly enough. Another cost; loss of early payment discounts. And finally, overpayments because you didn’t have the visibility into your AP processes. Automation shows ROI in the first year and it’s huge. Ask us about the ROI calculator to help with figuring your current manual accounts payable costs and how much time and money automating can save you.

Resource Allocation:

When an invoice automation solution is implemented, your resources can be re-distributed to allow your valuable staff to handle much more important responsibilities… Like customer service. You already have a great team, and with an automation solution, the flexibility you will be presented with by automating mundane, error-prone manual data tasks can help you with focusing on the reason you are in business – your customers.

Satisfies Suppliers:

Have you ever encountered a supplier happy about being paid late? Didn’t think so. By automating invoice processing, you increase the speed in which you are able to pay your suppliers. Wouldn’t it be great if they were more willing to negotiate terms and costs because of your great payment history?

Supports Employee Happiness:

Finally, your knowledge workers are people with emotions and brains and I’m sure that they have thought at some point that there must be something better than manually keying in data from all the invoices they process on a daily basis. Would your team welcome some assistance to make their job more efficient? Would a solution that provided all of these points make your CFO happy? If so, give us a shout.