Too Much Paper, Too Many Emailsĭoes your business frequently straddle the line between a digital ecosystem and an old-fashioned, paper-based office? Although digitization is a time-saver, an unwieldy hybrid between digital and paper creates more problems than it solves. AP’s job isn’t only to pay suppliers but also to cultivate strong relationships with vendors. Structuring systems while being mindful of this fact can open the door to significant improvements. Remember: Your work in AP affects someone else’s bottom line. Habitual lateness doesn’t encourage vendors to continue working with your business, and some may choose to refuse transactions due to a history of slow or late payments. A late payment creates multiple problems-most immediately, a fee tacked onto your account with the vendor. Late payments often occur because of other invoicing issues. Identifying these issues is challenging when you’re handling hundreds of invoices every week, and errors will cost you. With a manual billing system, problems with an invoice could reach deep into the cycle before someone realizes that the numbers don’t line up or spots an exception. You cannot always trust that invoices will be 100% accurate or that you will receive everything that a vendor quoted on a purchase order. Vendors are just as susceptible to human error as those working within your business. Real-world conditions and third-party service inefficiencies shouldn’t have such a strong opportunity to impact your business. “The check is in the mail” is one of the oldest half-truths in business, and it is unlikely to satisfy your suppliers when you cannot explain why a payment is late. Is your business still relying on “snail mail” to complete the final step of paying an invoice? Handling paper invoices is troublesome enough, but issuing paper checks and putting them in the mail is even more burdensome in today’s business world. Tearing down these walls and unifying your approach is the right strategy. Silos increase the risk of common accounts payable problems such as duplicate payments. When your teams are siloed because of different software solutions that they use at varying stages of invoice processing, inefficiencies develop. How visible is the information in your AP department? For many companies, the answer is “not very visible,” and it shows. High costs driven by rising error rates can short-circuit growth. Consider how much of a difference in cash flow your company could record across an entire fiscal year. Each invoice adds up, ultimately costing tens of thousands of dollars (or more). Without a modern and automated approach to this effort, error rates can climb, driving up processing costs. For growing organizations that process 20,000 or fewer invoices, the cost is a staggering $15.97 per invoice. High costs are one of the biggest challenges in invoice processing and the most obvious impact that the AP department has on a business’s operations.Īccording to a 2020 report by the Institute of Finance and Management (IOFM), the average cost for organizations handling up to 100,000 invoices per year is about $6.10 when they process each invoice manually. What Is the Average Cost of Processing an Invoice? There are real-world consequences for failing to face these challenges head-on: poor vendor relationships, ballooning late payment charges and a clear impact on your bottom line.įirst, we’ll examine six of the most common stumbling blocks in accounts payable processes and your business systems-next, we’ll look at worker-related invoice processing errors. What are the challenges in accounts payable? Before you can select and implement an appropriate solution, you’ll need to identify the areas where your AP teams and processes aren’t as efficient as they could be.
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