Want to eliminate paper, cut costs and save time? Invoice Processing solves it all!
If your business still uses manual, paper-based activity for accounts payable and invoice processing, you aren’t alone. But, do you know how much this is costing your company, especially in terms of time, effort and energy?
- Industry estimates place the cost of manual invoice processing at $12-$17 for each individual invoice, with the average falling at more than $15.
- It takes the typically company nearly 3 days to manually validate, approve and process an invoice.
- Even after double checking, human errors can happen – about 3.6 percent of all manually-processed invoices contain errors.
- A lost invoice can create added expenditures – it currently costs businesses $125 to find a single lost invoice, or as much as $225 to replace it.
Key pain points like losing documents, missing errors or data entry mistakes, and long approval processes plague businesses that are still using manual processing for invoicing and accounts payable. In fact, long approval times, late payments and dealing with paper documents are among the top frustrations felt by finance and accounting teams today.
The Solution: Invoice Processing with an advanced Document Management System
It’s time to update these legacy, manual processes, and bring in advanced and innovative technology that can help eliminate errors, cut down on processing and approval times and reduce costs across the board.
The solution is to leverage an innovative document management system, or DMS, alongside your existing accounting system. Here at Inception Technologies Inc., we have several different solution structures for invoice processing, depending upon your needs. The end results, though, speak for themselves:
- Cut invoice processing costs by 50 to 95 percent.
- Prevent missing invoices or associated documents.
- Eliminate the need for human intervention, thereby stopping costly errors. Touchless processing!
- Boost visibility into your invoice processing and accounts payable activity, including the ability to access historical and archived documents whenever needed.
- Ensure that tasks involved in invoice processing and approval are routed to right employees, cutting down on long approval times and enabling you to take advantage of prompt payment discounts.
- Streamline, standardize and improve efficiency within your invoice processing and accounts payable processes.
We’ve created the ideal solution for simplifying your invoice processing, whether you choose to:
- Have our Inception experts scan paper invoices and associated documents for you, at our state-of-the-art facility through our Capture Services.
- Deploy our innovative capture technology at your own premises with the help of our Capture Technology. We have options for every need, including document scanners, scanner rental and capture software.
Once your invoices have been digitized, our advanced DMS DocuWare takes over, providing you with an accessible, simple-to-use and intuitive platform for filing, transferring and processing your invoices.
How does Invoice Processing with DocuWare work?
Let’s examine each step of invoice processing with an advanced document management system:
Invoice filing and processing:
- Paper invoices are scanned (either at your business, or by our team of Inception experts at our facility) and then filed electronically.
- We provide support for emailed invoices, too. You can easily transfer emailed invoices and documents directly from your inbox with a single click.
- The advanced DMS recognizes each invoice, automatically reads over the content and helps you accurately, efficiently and correctly file each one. The software checks for the vendor name, due date, invoice number and amount, and if any information is missing, it automatically flags it, enabling you to nip any mistakes or issues before they cause problems and frustration later on.
- Our DMS also includes robust integration with your internal accounting system. This means you can also select your unique vendor codes and account types as each invoice is filed.
- DocuWare learns from you. The platform recognizes subsequent invoices from the same vendor and can automatically index and preallocate invoices according to the actions you took with this particular vendor’s invoices in the past.
Accounts payable:
- Once invoices have been scanned and filed, DocuWare distributes the associated accounts payable tasks to the appropriate employee in your organization, keeping workflows streamlined and simple.
- DocuWare’s advanced task window displays recently archived invoices and their attached to-do items, including assignment to the specific cost center.
- After to-do items are completed, the invoice is forwarded to the right cost center manager, who receives an email notification that includes a link directly to the invoice. This helps put an end to lost invoices, making sure that no documents or action items fall through the cracks.
- After checking and reviewing, stakeholders can then digitally approve the invoice.
- From here, your accountants can switch over to your internal accounting system, where DocuWare automatically provides nearly all the information necessary for posting.
- Approved documents are posted immediately in your internal account system, and then confirmed in the DocuWare DMS.
As you can see, DocuWare supports a standardized approach to invoice processing, approval and accounts payable posting.
What does this mean for you and your employees?
Updating and digitizing your invoices significantly reduces the time spent on processing and speeds invoice approval. This ensures that you can pay your invoices on time, every time, saving you frustration and headaches, while earning you discounts.
Today’s accounting teams have a lot on their plates, and having to deal with a mountain of paper invoices only adds to this workload. Offloading and automating these processes will free up considerable time for your employees, enabling them to focus on more important tasks to support your vendor relations, business processes and overall mission.
And with robust archiving, tracking and searchability provided in DocuWare, you’re more than prepared to provide documentation to vendors, and support tax preparation and external audits. What’s more, DocuWare is specifically aligned with the latest laws and guidelines, ensuring all documents are stored in a compliant manner.
Whether you want to scan your invoices yourself at your own location, or have us take care of this time-consuming process for you, Inception Technologies is your partner for invoice processing.
Connect with us today to learn more about our Invoice Processing, Capture Technology and Capture Services.