Business Continuity
Why growing businesses should digitise their invoices
The key to successfully managing accounts payable (AP) is visibility: Knowing what's paid, what's pending approval, what's overdue, and what requires immediate attention. The challenge is that manual processes and the invoices arriving by email, paper, PDF, and portals obscure your view of what's coming and going. As your business grows, the complexity and the fuzziness only increase. Digitisation of invoices and automation of AP processes provide a way for businesses to gain clarity.
By eliminating manual workflows and increasing control, organisations improve accuracy and compliance, accelerate approvals, bolster cash flow management, gain efficiency, and strengthen supplier relationships.
How do organisations benefit from AP digitisation and automation?
Digitisation may seem a small step to improving invoice management. But consider what your organisation could do with the time and resources freed by best-in-class invoice processing, such as lowering per-invoice processing costs by 70% (£2.10 vs. the average £7.11) or reducing invoice handling times by 66% from 9.2 days to 3.1 days, as Ardent Partners research found.
To understand how organisations can handle more invoices more effectively whilst keeping operations lean, this blog will explore:
- Why outdated manual processes hinder efficiency and obscure a complete, timely view into AP data.
- How digitisation and automation improve visibility, strengthen compliance, make AP teams more productive, and utilise tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
- Why you can't afford to wait any longer to modernise your AP function.
Why now is the right time to digitise your invoices
Learn how organisations benefit by automating their AP processes and managing the complexity that increases with growth.
How growth + outdated processes slow AP
AP employees spend considerable time rounding up invoices, chasing down and validating details, and matching invoices, purchase orders, and goods receipts. When invoice volume rises or approvers are unavailable, the manual process can create significant bottlenecks, consuming more time and risking both compliance and relationships with suppliers wanting answers and their money.
With poor visibility into liabilities hindering cash flow management and forecasting, organisations with manual AP processes face such difficulties as:
- Risk grows because more invoices make it challenging to keep clean records and establish trustworthy trails for audits.
- Inaccurate and incomplete data requires more manual reconciliation by already-stressed teams, weakens reporting and forecasting, and minimises the effectiveness of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
- Exceptions consume the team's energy and slow down payments, leading to missed early pay discounts or loss of preferential supplier pricing.
What specific benefits does invoice digitisation deliver?
For growing businesses with growing numbers of transactions, digitisation and automation streamline the AP process from invoice receipt to approval by enhancing efficiency, speeding capture and coding, improving compliance, and raising visibility and control.
How AP teams gain efficiency through digitisation
Invoice digitisation closes gaps in workflows and helps standardise them, meaning employees spend less time finding invoices in inboxes and portals, re-typing information, and pursuing missing details. With a self-service portal, suppliers can submit invoices and track them through the system, reducing calls and back and forth with the AP team and other approvers. Dashboards and reporting tools let the team know what's pending or overdue and see the coming impact on cash flow.
What AI does to accelerate AP processing
With optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning, and more advanced AI tools, organisations can easily extract and code information from their growing volume of invoices. The AI-powered tools perform two- and three-way matching of purchase orders and receipts, whilst spotting exceptions, duplicates, and missing details—so the AP team doesn't have to and can instead focus on approvals.
How AP automation strengthens compliance
Simplified and consistent workflows make certain that policies are followed and preserve documentation for audits. Compliance is built into the processes, enforcing your pre-chosen controls at the time of submission instead of after the fact and managing approvals based on the policies you set.
Why integration improves AP visibility and control
The advantages of digitising and automating invoice processes are sizable, but the benefits are compounded when an AP solution is integrated with your ERP or other business systems, such as travel and expense. The broader, more holistic view of integrated, cloud-based systems simplifies reconciliation and month-end close, provides a real-time view of cash flow, empowers budgeting and forecasting, and eases the burden on IT teams.
Conclusion: AP digitisation solutions
Digitisation clearly supplies advantage in visibility and efficiency for growing businesses seeking to scale and improve their invoice management and AP processes. Concur Invoice helps organisations automate their AP function from end to end and reduces invoice processing costs, handling invoices 2.5 times faster and cutting costs 20% over manual workflows, as 2024 research found. Digitisation also delivers other valuable benefits that help companies at any time, but are especially important amid growth, rising costs, and sustained economic and geopolitical volatility: The ability to get information in near-real-time to inform more confident decision-making.
Why now is the right time to digitise your invoices
Learn how organisations benefit by automating their AP processes and managing the complexity that increases with growth.
FAQs: Why growing businesses should digitise their invoices
Q: Why is visibility important in AP?
A: Visibility helps organisations understand current and upcoming liabilities, improve cash flow management, and make more informed financial decisions.
Q: What challenges do growing businesses face with manual invoice processes?
A: Manual AP workflows require significant time for data entry, validation, and approvals. As invoice volume increases, organisations risk delays, errors, compliance issues, and strained supplier relationships.
Q: How does invoice digitisation improve efficiency?
A: Digitisation enables automated invoice capture, coding, routing, and approvals. It speeds processing, lowers costs, and helps AP teams manage larger invoice volumes with fewer resources.
Q: What role can AI play in invoice processing?
A: AI technologies can extract invoice data, perform two- and three-way matching, identify exceptions, and flag duplicates, allowing AP teams to focus on strategic activities.
Q: How does integration with ERP and other systems add value?
A: Integration provides a real-time view of financial data, simplifies reconciliation and month-end close, improves forecasting, and enhances overall visibility and control across the business.
