Do You Believe Paper Invoices Belong in the Past?
Today, in this modern competitive business world, one might be astonished to find that vendors are still sending paper invoices. Snail mail is still the most common invoicing process in some parts of the world. But this does not indicate that your accounts payable department need to be stuck with the traditional paper stacks on their desks and late-night shifts of entering data manually.
The best AP teams are using modern technology to eliminate these manual steps from the accounts payable process to avoid viewing paper invoices ever again.
Why You Should Eliminate Paper Invoices
Managing paper invoices in a manual process is quite challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone that may hurt your business in various ways. Here are a few instances.
- Entering data manually leads to inaccuracies in financial reports.
- Making late payments to vendors’ results in missed discounting opportunities.
- Misplaced or lost invoices affect vendor relationships and supply chain stability.
- Inaccurate closing of books while accounts payable is struggling to put the correct data together for a month and year-end reporting.
- Fraudulent invoices being paid by mistake.
The Primary Step: Invoice Data Capture
To get rid of paper invoices in the accounts payable process, you must begin with invoice reception. There are multiple accounts payable solutions on the market for data capture and invoice scanning. It will aid you to transform paper invoices or any other invoice format like e-invoices or pdf’s into data in a unified digital format. This vital invoice detail is captured using intelligent technology and pre-configured business logic.
Once you get this invoice data in a digital format, the fun begins. Now, you are set to revolutionize accounts payable process leveraging tools to speed up and automate many steps that were earlier managed manually.
Invoice Data Capture for Successful Automation
While choosing and setting up a solution to capture invoice data, make sure that you consider the next step- automated accounts payable process. Changing invoices from paper to digital format will help the AP team to eliminate pains of a manual process.
By digitizing the most detailed invoice data, you will remain in a good position to implement automated invoice processing workflows. It indicates having accounts payable automation solution perform the heavy work of coding, validating, matching, and distributing the invoices while you can only focus on dealing with the invoices that require an expert’s eye on them or any additional control step.
Ensure that reaching high-levels of automation needs and invoice data capture solutions which can offer the right level of accuracy and details are implemented correctly. It is crucial that you think through the whole process of invoice data capture and invoice processing workflow and make sure you have a proper understanding of data requirements for every step of the process.
