Invoice Management in a Digital Age - No More Paper Pushing
To the uninitiated, processing and paying an invoice appears like a simple task – a step-by-step procedure that requires a bit of organisation and a touch of manual data entry. How hard could that be? In theory, that would be a fairly sound assumption However, if you speak to anybody who has ever worked in a finance team, they will tell you it’s not as simple as it seems.
There are dozens of ways an invoice process can be thrown off course, from paper and digital invoices being distributed widely across the business and not reaching the finance team immediately, to lack of visibility into outstanding accruals, and even delays to payment reconciliation through integration issues. It doesn’t take long for a system to become overwhelmed and backed up, which can lead to a whole new set of problems, more than just unnecessary workload. A greater volume of invoices only compounds these problems.
Take a trip with us and read our infographic ‘The Journey of and Invoice’ and discover how AP automation overcomes most of the problems and delays that might occur during the journey of an invoice.
By implementing an automated system, businesses can address some of the issues encountered throughout the invoice journey, speeding up the process and giving you better control over business spend and manage cash flow. It takes on average 17 days to manually process an invoice; with AP staff spending their time inputting data, chasing approvals and moving the invoice along the chain. Haven’t you ever asked yourself “is there a better way to do things”? Thankfully there is but, without addressing the issues from start to finish, a level of inefficiency and inaccuracy will always remain, which ultimately costs both time and money.
Identifying a challenge that needs to be solved is the ethos on which SAP Concur solutions is built on and when you start to harness our wider ecosystem it will take your capabilities to the next level. Working with our partner, TransferMate, we have developed the PaymentsHub solution improving the functionality to make invoice processing and payments as easy as they should be. Concur Invoice handles the complex and arduous processing element, which is then passed on to PaymentsHub to close the loop with an automated payment solution.
Using PaymentsHub, manual file uploads for bank transfers are no longer necessary, cross-border payments are no longer costly, and integration into SAP Concur solutions for reconciliation is immediate. This enables businesses to truly have an end-to-end solution for invoicing to be proud of that will work for you, not against you. Together we hope to make finance teams lives’ a little easier by providing the tools they need.
If you would like to learn more about PaymentsHub, visit the SAP Concur App Centre, or the TransferMate website for more information.