Is your finance team supporting your company's growth?
Probably not.
They're most likely spending more than half of their time processing invoices and purchase orders (Source: APQC) rather than uncovering valuable metrics to support high-level decision making.
Electronic invoicing, or e-Invoicing, streamlines the processing of trading documents. Here are 8 fundamental advantages of trading in your paper documents for an electronic solution:
1. Reduced costs - electronic invoices can be processed with greater efficiency, meaning that you won't have to hire new accounts staff to deal with additional trading documents as your business grows. Moreover, electronic invoicing can lead to savings of 60-80% when compared to paper-based invoicing, with a payback period of 6-18 months (Source: Billentis Report 2015).
2. Cash Flow management - greater visibility from electronic invoices leads to greater responsiveness, reducing uncertainty regarding payment times, leading to improved cash management.
3. Error Management - invoices that don't contain the right data can be identified automatically and passed straight back to the supplier for modification. Suppliers rightfully get concerned about the payment status of their invoices, not knowing whether it contained all of the correct information and is in the queue to be processed, or whether something was missing and they'll have to re-submit, potentially adding weeks to the time until they receive payment. With error management, suppliers know straight away if their invoice has been rejected for lack of sufficient data, allowing them to amend and re-submit without delay.
4. Avoid repetitive tasks - due to the sheer number of invoices needing to be processed by accounts departments, work carried out by accounts staff can be very repetitive. Electronic invoicing can automate most of that work, allowing accounts staff to focus on other more value-adding tasks, such as spend management, credit control and support for procurement decisions.
5. Enhanced archiving - extensive archives of trading documents may be required for compliance purposes, which becomes considerably cheaper at scale and is easily accessible with electronic invoices.
6. Process visibility - knowledge of where invoices are in the approval process gives your business a clearer picture of where cash is being held up. Additionally, more complete and searchable data allows for problems relating to invoice quality and processing to be identified and solved promptly.
7. Effective procurement - electronic invoices can feed in to procurement analytics solutions, delivering valuable results needed to optimise the overall Source-to-Pay process.
8. Healthier supply chain - interacting on a common, transparent platform builds confidence within your supply chain. Faster flagging and resolution of invoice issues means less back-and-forth between suppliers and customers on mundane issues and opens up possibilities for higher-level discussions that lead to enhanced trading relationships.
The sole act of digitising your invoices facilitates a wide range of benefits, but being part of a network of tens of thousands of companies that are doing the same opens up a whole plethora of possibilities. Find out if your suppliers and customers are already trading electronically on the Tradex e-Invoicing platform.
Want to find out how much time and money Tradex can save your business? Click the button below to book a discovery session.
