Touchless Invoice Processing
Accounts payable without touchless invoice processing is slow, and can lead to a lot of problems. Think back to grade school, when your teacher had you all sit in a row for a game of telephone. Starting out with a somewhat simple phrase like “two toads ate fat flying flies” or “cats enjoy napping in cute boxes”, each peer whispered what they thought they knew into their neighbor’s ear. This might repeat ten, twenty, thirty times before it finally came to the last person. Often, the message was immensely distorted beyond recognition.
Why is this important? Well, your AP department is one giant game of telephone. Every time a piece of paper passes through the hands of another employee, something else could potentially go wrong. A wrong number here, a mixed-up invoice there, and by the time that piece of paper passes through the hands of ten employees, the invoice is inaccurate and needs to be corrected. The cycle starts all over again, and weeks of time spent on the invoice was for nothing.
The only way to ensure an increased accuracy rate and a drastically reduced processing time is by switching to touchless invoice processing, also known as straight through processing, through accounts payable automation. This requires moving from a paper-based system to a fully digitized and automated system, resulting in time and money savings in the form of fewer errors, less exceptions, and a reduction in calls from suppliers. A high-level OCR system could possibly handle this, but using a supplier portal is the best way to go, as there will never be any paper throughout the process.
Touchless invoice processing, or electronic invoicing, automatically matches submitted invoices and allows suppliers to self-correct before the invoice even reaches the buyer, resulting in savings in both time and money for both the supplier and the buyer.
For touchless invoice processing to fully work, the AP department has to be committed. Though it might be tempting to check up on the invoices every step of the way, doing so makes the switch to straight through processing obsolete.
Just like a game of telephone, the fewer people the message passes through, the more accurate the message is. The invoice is automatically checked by the system and is still signed off by those with permissions to approve. So commit to touchless invoice processing to give your AP department the advantage of time and money saved.