The Best Reasons for Automated Invoicing

Is your invoice process a burden?

Truth is, a wide swath of companies are waking up to the reality that their antiquated invoice processes are holding their accounts payable (AP) department back. They are looking for ways to better their account payable workflows and specifically their invoicing management. 

Often, that means investing in tools that cut costs, save time, and increase their productivity overall. 

Automated invoicing is the solution that will empower your AP team to focus on more valuable tasks by replacing your manual workflow with a more efficient and secure electronic process. Cutting down on costs and wasted time while eliminating most avenues for human error and mistakes. 

What is automated invoicing?

It's a modern invoicing process that uses software technology to process your invoices, send them to the appropriate approvers, and finalize payments via your ERP. Through it you can minimize, or entirely eliminate, paper from your AP invoice process. 

Keep reading today's article to discover the best reasons to choose invoice automation. 

1) Reduce Your Cost Per Invoice (CPI)

Manually processing paper invoices not only burdens your staff and takes up too much time — it costs more than it has to.

Per CFO Daily News, the average cost to process a single invoice in 2020 — accounting for labor, overhead, and technology — was $10.89. Other sources calculate it to be higher than that. It varies depending on the amount of time required to process an invoices and the amount of resources utilized in doing so. 

Resources used in manual invoicing can include total labor costs, systems costs, supply costs, total overhead, outsourcing fee, and other assorted AP processing costs unique to your business. 

Switching to invoice automation will lower your costs by 80%. And the benefits don’t stop there.

2) Save Time via Invoice Automation

Digital transformation is a common goal for modern companies — for good reason. Replacing manual and often outdated processes with current technology and automation results in increased efficiency and saved time.

AP teams are often spending too much time manually entering invoice data, correcting errors, scanning invoices, routing invoices to relevant approves, and more. 

Studies show that invoice automation, with the right partner, can result in a department that processes invoices at four times the rate they did previously. This is more important than ever, as research has found that the average processing time for a single invoice in 2020 was 10 days.

In a time where B2C payments are near instantaneous, 10 days is an eternity.

Long Processing Times Occur Because of Bottlenecks Such As:Convoluted invoice workflows

• Staff stuck waiting on approvals
 
• Slow document exchange between AP and AR teams

Identifying where the bottlenecks are for your AP team is the first step towards saving time. Automated invoicing will solve all of them.

It replaces convoluted workflows with an automated and clear process — set and controlled by you — that will send notifications to approvers to minimize waiting time and make exchanging document and verifications simpler than ever.

3) Experience a Completely Automated Invoice Process

There are a lot of features that come along with invoice automation. These include increased security, real-time alerts, and visibility into cash flow.

Invoice automation also fosters a stress-free workflow through auto-paying bills and allows your workforce to be more mobile via remote approvals that can be handled as easily from the office as the home. 

Check out this explainer video to get a walkthrough of how invoice automation can give your AP department an advantage.

4) Reduce Risk of Fraud Through AP Invoice Automation

Invoice automation doesn't just make processes easier, it also makes them more secure. 

For example, our invoice automation solution, increases security by 85%. It does this by giving you more control and insight into your processes and cashflow. It will scan emailed and mailed invoices with 99% accuracy and send alerts to the relevant people for anything suspicious that is caught and flagged — enabling you and your staff to review it and decide on what, if any, step to take next. 

Receive alerts for suspicious incidents such as: sudden increases in invoice volume, extreme variations in amounts asked for, duplicate invoice alerts, and fluctuations in vendor payment information. 

All of your invoices will automatically be recorded and saved in the same place so that you can find them for reporting and tracking purposes. Invest in invoice automation and reduce your cause to worry about invoice fraud. 

Conclusion

Invoice automation is being used by forward-thinking companies because it frees you from paper, saves time, cuts costs, and brings all the features of today’s technology.

Why wait to invest in automated invoicing?

Our expert team will take care of all the onboarding and system setup, and you could be fully onboarded and processing invoices in less than 45 days! 

Get in touch today to get started.